The American words in the sentences below are printed in italics. Replace each American word or phrase with a British word or phrase from the following list

petrol

jam

underground

specialise

queue

garden

cinema

maths

rubbish

note

petrol station

secondary school

autumn

lift

ground floor

university

sweets

shops

windscreen

(a) We had to stand in line at the movie-theatre last night.

(b) Our back yard looks lovely in the fall. The leaves on the trees turn brown and red.

(c) He wants to major in math at college when he leaves high school.

(d) When you stop for gas at a gas station, they sometimes clean your windshield.

(e) We had to buy a lot at the stores, then we took the subway home.

(f) The elevator 's broken down again, but it doesn't matter. We live on the first floor.

(g) She likes candy and bread and butter with jelly on it. They're bad for her teeth.

(h) The only money I have is a twenty dollar bill.

(i) In this district they only collect the garbage once a week.

Additional exercises:

1. State which of the words are used in America, which in England.

Mail-car, mail-van, mailman, postman, mail-box, pillar-box, special delivery, express post, domestic mail, inland post, foreign mail, overseas mail, telegraph blank, telegraph form.

Read the following extract and give more examples illustrating the same group of Americanisms. What do we call this group?

M: — Well, now, homely is a very good word to illustrate Anglo-American misunderstanding. At any rate, many funny stories depend on it, like the one about the British lecturer visiting the United States; he faces his American audience and very innocently tells them how nice it is to see so many homely faces out in the audience.

Homely in Britain means, of course, something rather pleasant, but in American English not very good looking. This older sense is preserved in some British dialects.

(From A Common Language by A.H. Marckwardt and R. Quirk) (In this book two prominent scholars, an American and an Englishman, discuss the differences between the American and British varieties of English).

Read the following extract. What are the three possible ways of creating names for new species of plants and animals and new features of the landscape? Give more examples of the same. What do we call this group of Americanisms?

Q:...I think that this time we ought to give some attention to those parts of the language where the differences in the vocabulary are much more noticeable.

M: Yes, we should. First, there are what we might call the 'realia' — the real things — the actual things we refer to in the two varieties of the language, for example, the flora and fauna — that is to say the plants and animals of England and of the United States are by no means the same, nor is the landscape, the topography.

Q: All this must have created a big problem for those early settlers, mustn't it?

M: It surely did. From the very moment they set foot on American soil, they had to supply names for these new species of plants and animals, the new features of landscape that they encountered. At times they made up new words such as mockingbird, rattlesnake, egg-plant. And then occasionally they used perfectly familiar terms but to refer to different things. In the United States, for example, the robin is a rather large bird, a type ofthrush.

Q: Yes, whereas — with us it is a tiny little red-breasted bird.

M: And a warbler, isn't it?

Q: Yes.

M: It sings. Corn is what you call maize. We never use it for grain in general, or for wheat in particular.

Q: Or oats. Well, wouldn't foreign borrowings also be important in a situation like this?

M: Oh, they were indeed. A good many words, for example, were adopted from the American Indian languages — hickory, a kind of tree; squash, a vegetable; moccasin, a kind of footwear. We got caribou and prairie from the early French settlers. The Spanish gave us canyon and bronco.

(From A Common Language by A.H. Marckwardt and R. Quirk)

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