The Odds Are Good, But The Goods… Are SO Odd

D. snapped this shot because it struck him as so odd. 911 is only the number for emergency services in the US! In the UK, one dials 999 in an emergency… so, how can the number have any meaning? We’d say it was as odd as driving on the left-hand side of the road, except that dialing 999 actually makes a bit more sense to us than 911 does…

Sometimes at home, heavy rains made our phone lines have static — here, we have no idea what’s causing the problem, but it’s resulted in call after call to British Telecomm. We think that we must be about the only people in the UK to be happy that British Telecom’s call centre is in India. Why? Because … D., after years of working with South Asians in the technology industry, can readily understand the accent! Oh, happy day. (And, yes, c-e-n-t-r-e. It annoys T. no end when D. spells it that way.)

Meanwhile, we continue to have it explained to us that we are Saying Everything Wrong. We don’t live in charring cross. We live in chairing cross. Please do not forget it.

In the US, the name Finlayson would be pronounced somewhat as it’s spelled: Fin (as in, those things on fish), lay (as in, lay down your cards), and son (as in someone’s male progeny). Fin-lay-son. Over here? Finnlsn. Sort of like fennel (the herb), but with an incredibly short i and an almost nonexistent e, to say Finnl. And the son has had the o scooped out and discarded, to leave it sounding more like sin, but also something like the sn in snore or sneeze. Finnls’n perhaps.

Again, in the US, the name McKay would sound like Mick (as in Mickey Mouse) and Kay (as in Okay). Here? Well, the Mick is right … but Kay? That says … something which sounds like wry or pie.

We give up.

We live in a city with very cool graffiti. There’s the usual tagging stuff, with scribbled names going on bridges and such, but we have to admit that the odd stenciled graffiti is usually strange and fun. Much of it has to do with bands, we assume, but someone has been putting hummingbirds around the city — and since there aren’t any in this country, we figure someone is homesick! No word of explanation on this alien abducted cow, however. (Something is homesick?)

Another oddity we would like to share is an expression we’ve heard recently. A person commented, “Well, that’s pants!” or “That’s just pants.” We don’t know what it means, really. We do know that “pants” here refers to underpants, rather than jeans. So … to say that something is “pants” is to call it …underwear… because? Anyone!?

Gem, our Eye on Glasgow (who is actually from Arran, but hey, she tries), answers our questions of “What’s that mean?” each week. Recently she has explained that “only schoolgirls” say “taking the mick.” The appropriate vulgarity is “taking the piss,” which makes no more sense to us than anything else, but which does come with a story. As Gem was told, it is a tale of rum runners — they denied running rum, and instead told officials that they were merely “taking the piss” out to sea. Or something.

Suffice it to say, we’ve heard a much less decorous explanation for these words! The upshot of this phrase is that it means mocking someone, to deflate them of false pride…and apparently, urine. It is, as Gem affirmed, very Scottish.

In a corner Convenience — and yes, that’s the name of the store — D. chuckled over a package labeled “Soor Plooms.” This is obviously an exaggeration — no one would really spell sour plums like that, but… Spelling is a variable thing here, we’ve noticed, based sometimes solely on phonetic pronunciation. In historical records from generation to generation, even the spellings of names shift, not to mention villages and cities. Standardized everything is a big deal in American schools (thank you, Henry Ford for your idea of schools as assembly lines), so it’s hard for us to fathom not having structured ways of doing things. Still, it seems to work for the city of Glasgow. T. remarks that it would be hard to be an American teaching English here, however!

It was with a lot of sadness — and a real sense of regret that we never got to know them better — that we heard that an American couple we’d met have had to go home. Apparently their work visas never came through, and the company for which they worked had hustled them out to the UK, given them poor advice, and then left them stranded. Years ago, when D. was offered a job in Egypt before he’d finished his Master’s, we experienced the same level of tension. T. was reluctant to go so far from home without guarantees, and D. felt there was a lot of money being offered without a lot of reason, so after hard consideration, we decided against relocating. It turned out to be for the best. It’s a scary time to re-enter the U.S. workforce with no car or house or job — but our fingers are crossed that they’re up to the challenge, and hopefully they’ll have other overseas adventures someday.

– D & T

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