Picking on Brits a Bit

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I had to reread my OP to find out why everyone is making a big deal out of the eggs, when I had said that I understand why you don't refrigerate eggs. I guess I should have emphasized that more.

I just don't like tea. It's unAmerican. Making hot tea is akin to Benedict Arnold, a traitor to the flag.
But, I do like it ice cold with lots of mint and sugar, but if I can actually taste tea in my tea, I pour it out. Blech.

Down here in the South, we also like our bacon thick and not burned. You must be thinking of the Yankies up North.

We seem to understand each other, and dictionaries will all be replaced with spellcheck anyways. :::sigh:::

Car indicator lights.... I don't know what the fug you're on about. Ha ha.
 
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MisterBadger

Part of the Furniture Now
Oct 6, 2024
606
4,463
Ludlow, UK
around here we hate the King (unless you're a rangers supporting, up the british union, orangeman hun) but I may be straying into political territory here...

Edit for clarity for yanks: the bit in brackets is me being deliberately politically sectarian, intended to make the bit after the brackets an understatement, which is a classic bit of British humour
@SmokeyJock Now you're discussing football - that's not politics, it's religion. Or perhaps, more serious than that. Though compared with Rugby, it's pretty lightweight.
 

sablebrush52

The Bard Of Barlings
Jun 15, 2013
20,971
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Southern Oregon
jrs457.wixsite.com
The biggest differences I see are, of course, in its TV programming, at least, as far as I can see from what's being shown in the US on Britbox, BBC America, and various streaming services.
The game shows feature well known celebrities as contestants, often involving a lot of wordplay, something not present on American game shows.
And British fictional programming doesn't feature "happy endings" like American programming. If there is a "happy ending" it's tinged with melancholy and sometimes bitterness. Americans prefer their happy endings sweet and uncomplicated.
 

woodsroad

Lifer
Oct 10, 2013
12,910
21,575
SE PA USA
Organisation is political, and of necessity, hierarchical. Political allegiances also exist within royalty, as they do within any organisational hierarchy - it's just that loyal Brits like me don't talk discuss that.
The American (mis)understanding of politics revolves strictly around the two parties. In actuality, all of human interaction is political, we're just too busy playing ostrich to see it.
 

sablebrush52

The Bard Of Barlings
Jun 15, 2013
20,971
50,183
Southern Oregon
jrs457.wixsite.com
<Rolling up sleeves and handing his jacket to a bystander> RIGHT...

First off, this Brit always rinses the soap off his dishes when he washes them. The way he was taught as a kid. I have never detected soap on dishes, or anywhere else it shouldn't be in the UK, except when smoking Gagsworth & Horrible blends.

Secondly, we like fresh eggs: a bit of poo and feather on the shell reassures us of their recent production. As someone else already said, we don't obsess about washing food containers.

Thirdly: I do admit we find it hard to end a conversation. If I happen to meet my next door neighbour on the track down to the road, we will start by asking after each other's health, then our family's, then having exhausted the subject of the long-range weather forecast and how our crops are doing, after half an hour we're bitching about how the County Council and/or the government is wasting our tax money, and what ought to be done about the war in Ukraine, whether Greg Wallace is misunderstood, (etc).

Fourthly: Apologizing (see what I did there?) for being bumped into or whatever, is a thing you mostly find in the southern counties of England, and especially among the genteel middle class. It's a regional/cultural/class thing. What they are thinking will be something quite different. Further north, we tend to speak as we find. Southerners think us boorish: we might consider them two-faced, and ourselves as forthright and honest.

Fifthly: I also admit British building specifications are shit: modern partition walls seem to be made of hardboard with a thin plaster skim. This is why I have never willingly lived anywhere that was built after the First World War. Older walls are much thicker - but try hammering a nail into the wall of a much older property and you never know whether you're going to hit an engineering brick, a random concrete patch, or go right through a section of mouldy chestnut lath and tired lime plaster. Unlike you, we let our old buildings stand until they fall down. Well, mostly.

But to be fair, I'm minded of what a friend from Kansas City said when she came to stay with us: she described the UK as like being in a parallel reality - which, in a way, it is. Now, it's my turn to generalise (did you see that?) about our Cousins Across The Water (and yes, I have several, between MI and FL):

1. Your tea is a disaster. I think the deficient method of infusion in lukewarm water is hardwired into your DNA ever since that episode in Boston Harbour in 1773 revolutionised (did you see that?) tea-making as a national tradition.

2. You do not understand bacon. It should be cut thick, cooked slowly, and not cremated into charred brittleness.

3. You follow that dyslexic Daniel Webster, when you had Samuel Johnson to guide you in spelling.

4. Your car indicator lights are the same colour as your brake lights. That's not only stupid, it's downright dangerous. As well as driving on the wrong side of the road: I suppose it's your national collective karma for slavishly following everything the French did because they too were at war with us.

5. The stripes on your (neck)ties (FFS, where else does one wear a tie?) run the wrong way.

6. TV: Yes, our programmes can be about as inane as yours (if not more so), but at least when our commercial breaks are finished, we can still remember what was happening in the show before the break started.

Summary: You folk do things differently from us, despite having been shown how to do them right, out of a deliberate perversity and as a laughable protestation of cultural independence, I reckon. I worked under a Lt/Cdr USN when my Brit equivalent went to Washington on a one-year exchange trip. They both came back with culture-shock, but - mind you, I was really sorry when the Yankee officer had to go, and when mine came back :)
I havee one thing to say in rebuttal to all of this. Something inexcusable. Lucas Electrics.
 
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