So you think you speak English?

by: christine mastalio
Staff Writer

As I held the door open for a guy in my apartment, he nodded his head and said, "Cheers". It was my second day in Scotland and I wondered if someone had forgotten to tell me an important cultural word.

Soon I would learn a whole new language.

Cheers means "thank you" and my apartment is really called a flat. But learning one or two words will not get you around Scotland. To order a meal in my first week was a cultural maze.

I needed a translator because I could only imagine what "bangers and mash" was. Visions of bad ‘80s rock bands came to mind. What I got, however, was sausage and mashed potatoes.

In a confusing tongue twister, French fries are chips and chips are crisps. Now that I had that straight, I learned a cookie is a biscuit and a biscuit is a scone. Even buying chocolate became a cultural adventure. Biting into a Scottish Mars Bar tasted like eating a Milky Way. And the Milky Way tasted like a Three Musketeers Bar.

A simple conversation with a flatmate would also reveal my limited knowledge of English as spoken in the UK.

"I was so pissed last night and now I’m knackered so I just can’t be asked to go to uni (pronounced you-knee)." Really what she meant to say was, "I was really drunk last night (not mad) and now I’m tired so I don’t want to go to class."

For weeks I felt like I needed language flashcards to converse with my Scottish friends.

Adjectives thrown into a conversation put a confused look on my face. Dodgy means shifty, but sometimes sketchy or weird. Bammy refers to anything lower-class or uncultured. A NED is not a guy down the hall, but a non-educated delinquent, usually a high school dropout drinking cheap wine on the corner.

Even simple words I can understand still remind me I’m a foreigner. You won’t find a Scottish sign saying "exit", they say "way out" instead. "For here or to go?" translates into "Sit in or take away"? Anti-clockwise means counter-clockwise and a return is a round-trip ticket.

"Isn’t it cold in here?" becomes "Is it not a wee bit chilly?" The Scots don’t "like" things, they "fancy" them and above all, you do not go to the bathroom, you go to the toilet. This only scratches the surface of the difference between "American" and English.

The surest way, however, to send the Scots into raucous laughter is to say the word pants. To me, it is a basic word, but here it means underwear. If you ever travel to Scotland and have just bought new pants, say trousers and please don’t share if you’ve just bought new underwear.