Culture Shock

Jennifer Clark
Aug 23, 2017 · 2 min read

Culture shock. One wouldn’t think that a move from Canada to the UK would inspire too much. At least, I didn’t think so. We’re a colony, right? The British influence is strong in Canada. We have Coronation Street on TV, the queen on our money and a Governor General! This move will be an easy one. How wrong I would prove to be.

The accent was familiar, most of the time. I had heard it on the nightly BBC news and from the actor who plays the ING banking expert in the ads, but the words, oh the words … I knew we were both speaking the same language, but half the time I could only reply with mute confusion. I found the idioms, slang and dropping of pronouns bewildering. Ever heard of cockney slang? I am now intimately acquainted. Allow me to initiate you- if someone asks you if you are “having a bubble,” they are making a Cockney reference. The “bubble” in question refers to a bath (bubble bath) and bath rhymes with “laugh” (still with me?). So, in terms of modern Cockney slang, if someone asks you if “you are having a bubble,” they are, in fact, asking you if have are having a laugh at them, i.e. mocking them. Is your head spinning yet?

As if that wasn’t challenge enough, I moved to the land of eternal sunshine. Australians, though there was not the liberal use of “crikey” and Crocodile Dundee references I expected, spoke another completely different version of English. The typical Canadian greeting of “How’s it going?” very subtly becomes “How you going?” A cell phone is a mobile. An elevator a lift. A parking lot a car park. I can’t tell you how many times a seemingly innocuous phrase uttered from my mouth would evoke a smirk, a chuckle or even a loud guffaw.

The irony, now that I have returned to the country of my birth, is that my personal use of language is a hybrid of these three, a combination of three similar and yet totally distinct lexicons, often resulting in polite Canadian confusion, or, in the case of my family, a good old fashioned ribbing.

Originally published on https://notsorandomassociations.wordpress.com/

Photo by Ryan Tang on Unsplash

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Jennifer Clark

Written by

Feminist, fair trade and sustainability enthusiast, lefty (political and hand preference)

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