'It's baah-sil'
I love mozarella tomato and basil everything. Sandwiches, salads, paninis, whatever. This is what happens whenever I mention it.
ME: “I’ll have the mozarella tomato and ‘bay-zil’, please”
British person: “Don’t you mean ‘baah-zil’?” *insert grin previously mentioned by pacificyorkshire*
Then I bit my tounge to stop myself from saying,
“You know, believe it or not, I’m fully capable of saying what I mean. I mean ‘bay-zil’ because I have SAID ‘bay-zil’ for the past 26 years and it’s always resulted in me getting the correct herb in my sandwiches and salads. You know the saying ‘when in Rome, do as the Romans do?’, well, I’m NOT Roman… I’m NOT English… I’m AMERICAN and I will freakin’ pronounce my words exactly how I decide to.”
This whole mind-rant takes place in about .02 seconds in my brain.
And, yes, it does happen every time someone says “don’t you mean baah-zil”.
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I turn around, raise an eyebrow and ask, “Are you correcting my ACCENT?”
That always shut them up…….but I confess that after being here over a decade, I now say ‘baahsil’
UGH! I just made a Live Journal post about this just last week. It had a lot more profane language though!
I also can’t stand when they correct my terminology. When a happy and content ME goes into a store and says, “Oh I want some potato chips!” and some mouth breather will always correct me, “Don’t you mean crisps?” This is when the shouting begins. It was cute the first few months I was here but now it’s annoying.
or how about these kickers of pronounciation just to mention the tip of the iceberg:
progress: proh-gress and prawgress
route: rowwt and rooote
aluminum: Aloomineeeum
vitamins: vidahmens and veehtamins
oh Ladies, better not get me started!
I forgot to mention the time I had my whole office in stitches one time cos of the way I say waffles and another time when I asked, “Is it time to bring in the trash can?”. How the hell is that funny? I thought one woman was gonna pee herself! I thought it was a bit rude to laugh at me but I didn’t say anything.
I love it when I say a word like “garbage”, and I get to hear it repeated back to me for the next five minutes, with a fake “American” accent: gahr-buj… gahr-buj… (yes, yes, my accent is HILARIOUS!) o__O
And some people get really defensive of the British word for things: I once referred to a toy as a “stuffed animal”, and it was as if I had committed a crime… “stuffed animal?! that’s MORBID! These are cuddly toys!” … and then there was the time, when I first moved here, that I mistakenly referred to the upper level of the building as the “second floor”. And a woman snapped “We’re not in AMERICA- in THIS country that’s not the second floor!” (hey, I’m happy to learn the British word for things, but why the angry over-reaction??)
The most common one for me is ‘router’. I say ‘raow-terr’ instead of ‘root-tah’ and everyone starts going ‘RAOW-TERRRR’ ‘RAOW-TERRR’ ‘RAOW-TERRR’ like a bunch of possessed zombies…
Trash can! It happens to me all the time….. when we’re in the US.
And back in Europe I have to watch my “adaptions”. But really it IS hilarious most of the time.
It is! When you get someone to pee herself or have a waiter baffled just because you said “tomahtoo” or “cutlery” instead of “silverware”! Or when someone tells me to “pop the hood” or when I say the luggage is in the boot.
Just accept British and American English are different.
Kisschick1976 – about the potato chips. Americans invented them, we should be able to call them by their proper name! I hate being smugly corected about that. It isn’t our fault that they misnamed frites chips. Stop renaming the foods of other countries.
The odd thing is an American talking to a Brit in the US will say “oh, you mean bay-zil” but won’t put that corrective spin on things, and will just make the sandwich. We would consider that being rude to a tourist/outsider.
“getting the correct herb”
You mean ‘erb?
I’m definitely a Bah-sil! Baysil sounds like something one might use to clean one’s windies.