Welcome to Floor-dah, or adventures in pronunciation.

Well, I made it 4 days without crying. Admittedly, I had had a few beers this time, which didn't help in the slightest, but I think tears are probably likely to surface occasionally. I did, after all, just move continents.


The whole moving continents thing makes you look at the world around you in a totally different way. By that I mean, instead of when you're on holiday (I so nearly said vacation there, which is horrendous and is exactly the sort of thing I'm going to talk about!) you notice the big things that are different - like driving on the right (and not necessarily correct!) side of the road, currency, accents, etc. It's only when you spend a lot of time in one place - or know you are going to - that you notice all the smaller things that are different.


Here is an example. I went to the bank this afternoon to cash a check I'd got in the post. I went to the counter and asked to cash the check. I was presented 5 minutes later with several hundred dollars in notes. It turns out I had to specify that I wanted to deposit the check - if you ask to cash a check in this country, you will get exactly that back - cash.


Part of the reason for this is that the old cliche is true - the British and the Americans really are two nationalities separated by a common language. There are occasions where different words are used to mean the same thing - bathroom and toilet as an example. The really confusing bit is, like my fun times at Wachovia earlier, where the same word means different things. This is particularly true when it comes to slang and I've got myself in a lot of trouble in the past thanks to misadventures in slang - don't even ask what 'pulling' means in the US. (For any American readers, 'pulling' in the UK is a slang term for making out)


Then there's accents.


 A clear example - Florida. I say it with 3 syllables (flo-REE-dah). When my friends on this side of the pond say it, I hear 'FLOOR-dah'. Where we Brits have a short vowel sound, the Americans have a long one (repeat: ruh-PEET / REE-peet). Generally this is easy to decipher, but occasionally it can get messy - I had a complete misunderstanding with a friend of mine a couple of years ago due to the way each of us says the word garage.


I'm very predisposed to pick up accents of the people I'm with, and did return home from my six months working in the USA with a bit of an American twang and a lot of American terms (don't even ask about the 'stick shift' incident, I'm still paying for it 3 years late). But now I am here, and here for good, I can already feel myself fighting in my head for the survival of British English, which feels like one of the cornerstones of my 'Britishness' and which, now I'm ex-patriated, feels much more important than before. I've often read about how language becomes a huge part of a person's identity when they move abroad - I just didn't realise the same issues applied between two English-speaking countries.


I'll sign off for now with an apology for geeking out on this - but as a linguist, I think about this stuff all the time :)

First Post....

Hi folks...

This is my first post from my new blog, which I am hoping will keep me sane during what is a very turbulent but exciting point in my life.


I can't imagine anyone would possibly be reading this who didn't already know what I am doing in a town just outside Orlando with no job and my entire life in 4 suitcases, but just in case, I will give you the short version. On October 21st I got on a plane to the United States, one way, ending two and a half years of long-distance relationship with my fiance Jason. I have a visa that took 8 months and a four-figure sum to obtain, and next month we will be getting married. After that we will start the long and painful journey to getting my green card and starting our lives together.


I should mention at this point that I have prior experience working and living in Florida - that is how me and the Boy met - but it turns out leaving for six months and leaving, for all intents and purposes, for good, are very different. Leaving my family - and my best friends - at the airport was probably one of the hardest things I will ever do. I handled it quite well until approximately 20 hours later when I finally arrived in Orlando and proceeded to cry uncontrollably for another 2! The poor Boy didn't really know what to make of that, but I think I was just totally overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of what I was doing.


Fortunately there haven't been many more tears since then - although I am sure there will be along the way - and I have been trying to get into a position where I feel that I am living here and part of life here and less like I'm just on holiday. For me, that meant getting my driving license sorted as soon as possible. Fortunately, I only needed to renew it, so no test for me!! But I did have to talk my way out of a note on my record that said I had been driving my car in 2008 without insurance. Actually, I'd sold the car and let the insurance lapse, but the person who bought it never transferred the documents. Could have been big trouble, as I had no way of proving that was what happened. But fortunately I can, apparently, pull off 'bemused foreigner' quite well, and my license was renewed - until my visa expires at least. So now I can drive Jason's car, which gives me a bit of freedom coupled with a rather interesting convertible driver's sunburn. Sexy.


Anyway, that's enough for now. I'll get into the nitty-gritty later on, but for now I'm doing good. Got my first Halloween party tomorrow night - well, technically second, but the one I'm doing fancy dress for at least!! We'll see how it goes.....