Oh, the "English" language. From talking to people more, I'm realizing that American English is so much more different from English English than I thought.. it's weird. (I don't even know if that sentence makes sense in either English??) But regardless, it's really funny and entertaining to listen to at the same time. For instance, they still say 'plait' instead of 'braid' ...it's seriously reminiscent of the 1700's. I'd feel like a settler on the prairie if I said was going to plait my hair. They also pronounce a lot of words strangely to me. Here are a few that stick out to me; 

- "Z" ..Sure, this isn't a word but I'm including it on the list because they pronounce it differently. While learning the alphabet, as I hope anybody who is reading this did, Elmo taught us to say the letter Z like 'zee.' Here that's not the case.. Z = 'zed.' I do not know how that happened to get warped when the Puritans got their colonial on, but it's really confusing at first. For example; there's these map books called London: A to Z which the college has. Bill kept saying 'if you need to rent out the A to Zed's.. blahblah' and so I just thought the title of it was London: A to Zed. I don't know, maybe Zed is some kind of cul-de-sac or map term or something.. who knows. Regardless, when I get to my internship they also have different codes of which were referred to as 'Zed-1, Zed-2, etc.' It wasn't until I saw that all of these things were Z1, Z2, Z3, etc that I realized 'zed' is just how they pronounce Z. So I'm giving you super helpful advice if you have any encounters with letters or codes, see? Moving right along...

- "Status" ..Believe it or not, British people use Facebook. With Facebook comes statuses; completely commonplace phrase. However instead of the traditional 'st-aht-us' as any American would say, they pronounce it 'stay-tus.'

- "Literally" ..This one is Abby and Melissa's favorite word pronunciation of the Brits, so I'm including it. Instead of saying it as it's spelled - 'liter-allee' - they shorten it a bit to 'lit-rellee.' I have no idea if those phonetic spellings make sense to you, but they do to me. If not, oh well. It's my blog, not yours.

- "Aluminum" ..A completely random word, yes. But instead of 'aloo-min-um' they pronounce it 'al-you-min-ium' or something along those lines. It's completely hilarious to me.. it sounds like a Harry Potter spell. If you ever meet a Brit, just ask them what the silver tin foil is. It's really funny, I swear. I may start using this in my everyday life, if I can remember how to pronounce it.

- "Tomato" ..You know that really catchy Top 40 Pitbull song 'You Say Tomato, I Say Tomato'? That's a real thing. Indeed here it's called a 'toe-mahhh-toe' not 'toe-mayyy-toe.' But they to say potato, not usually 'po-tah-toe.'

They also say 'wingardium levi-OH-sa' instead of 'wingardium levio-sahhh..' [sad trumpet wah wah wah plays here..]

After that pathetic joke/reference, I will now leave you with this quip about British accents that was actually in a pros and cons chart about American English versus British Pronunciation: "Americans love RP [Received Pronunciation]. If you speak RP in America, people will think you are intelligent and the opposite sex will take more interest in you."

Right you are, about.com. Right you are. Thank you for publishing that jewel of an article.

(Bolding for emphasis in that section not provided by me.. that was seriously there.)

Until the next time I plait my hair with aluminium and write a status about it;

 xx