American words

I can think I’m saying “biscuit” and then discover, while editing my own video, that I’ve said “cookie” again. I’m trying. If I stop and think about the word, I’ll typically use biscuit, but cookie is still so ingrained that it slips back in without me noticing.

When I shared these vocabulary habits in April 2022, I’d lived and worked in the UK for six years. I was still getting comments telling me to stop using American words, even though I’m Canadian and say so all the time. Plenty of my vocabulary had changed, but expecting me to replace every word I’d learned growing up felt like a big ask.

Bathroom still feels more polite to me

Bathroom is my default for that room, whether it has a bath in it or not. I also grew up with words such as washroom and restroom, whereas here I’m much more likely to hear someone ask where the toilets are. I understand why calling a room without a bath a bathroom can annoy people, but I still can’t quite bring myself to switch.

To me, bathroom feels more polite. Toilet is so visual and a little too on the nose, even though I know it’s perfectly acceptable to ask for the toilets in a British pub. This isn’t about not knowing the word. I know it, but it doesn’t feel natural coming out of my mouth yet.

Pavement can mean the wrong bit of road

Pavement is a trickier one because I use the same word for something different. To me, it’s the road, the bit a car drives on. The part people walk along is the sidewalk. In the British usage I’m learning, that walking area is the pavement, so I have to stop and think about which bit we’re talking about.

I like sidewalk as a word because it’s specific and visual. That doesn’t stop me needing to learn the other meaning of pavement, though, and sometimes I still call the road pavement without meaning to. Highway and parking lot are similarly stuck in my vocabulary, even when I know the words I’m aiming for are motorway and car park.

I want fries, which means chips

Reading a menu can take a ridiculous amount of thought over one little word. The chips I grew up with are what people here call crisps, while British chips are what I’d call fries. Most of the time, the thing I actually want with my meal is fries. I don’t want crisps, but my brain still sees “chips” and starts with the Canadian meaning.

So I find myself mentally going through the whole thing again. Chips are fries here. My chips are crisps here. Which one am I about to order? I know the difference, but knowing it hasn’t made that quick translation completely automatic.

One missing letter causes a lot of comments

Math is another word I can throw into a conversation without thinking. I’m shortening mathematics to math, while the British version keeps the s and becomes maths. That one seems to drive a certain type of commenter crazy. I’ll casually say math in a video and then get a flood of people telling me it’s maths.

Garbage is less dramatic, but just as firmly stuck in there. With friends, I might ask someone to put something “in the garbage”, using the same word for the thing being thrown away and the container it’s going into. Here, I’d be aiming for “put the rubbish in the bin”. My old version sounds a bit nuts when I stop to think about it, but I still default to it.

Trying harder depends on who I am talking to

If I’m talking to a British person I don’t know, I try very hard to use the British equivalent when I know it. I want to be polite, and I’m living in their country. With friends or someone I’m comfortable with, I’m more likely to naturally fall back on highway, cookie or bathroom, because those were the first words I learned for those things.

I’ve picked up plenty of British words, phrases and slang, and I do try my best. Still, stripping out every Americanism takes time. I wondered whether another six years might make my vocabulary mostly British, or even entirely British, but who knows? I wasn’t there yet, and I didn’t think the occasional familiar word meant I wasn’t trying.

Watch my full list of words I still keep saying.