4 Ways American English is Pretty Weird | PART 1

Just like British English, American English is sometimes a little, um, quirky.

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[psithyrus]

I grew up "waiting in line" for things, but a lot of people around me now say they are "waiting on line" and frankly, I don't like it. The first time I heard it, I thought they meant they were waiting in an online queue for tickets or something.
It doesn't REALLY matter, I suppose, but it does kind of fill me with unbridled rage.

[wackyruss]

FUN FACT: The words crayfish and crawfish came from French! In Standard French, the word for crayfish is écrevisse and is pronounced Eh-CRAY-veese, thus we get CRAY-fish in English. However, in the Deep South in Louisiana the French Speaking Cajuns spoke a different dialect of French that had a Southern Drawl and pronounced it more like eh-CRAW-veese thus we got CRAW-fish in Southern American English.

[cixelsyd]

The r in the pronunciation of colonel comes from the fact the word was originally spelled coronelle. We just didn’t change the pronunciation when the French did.

[brianarthur]

Only British readers will find this interesting... back in 1995 I had a roommate from the UK for a few months. As it happened, I had a sports car that was missing a piece of plastic from the fan- switch assembly which looked bad in an otherwise pristine car. So I stopped by the Nissan dealer to see if I could get the part. I left my number as the parts guy promised to look for it. Later on, finding a blinking light on the answering machine I pressed the play button with my roommate in the area. "This is Bob from Nissan calling for Brian about his knob." My roommate rolled on the floor and must have played that message a dozen times.

[MarrockV]

I'm reminded of something once said by someone probably much wiser than myself... "The U.S. and Britain are two countries separated by the same language."

[vedritmathias]

As an American, I think "I could care less" was supposed to be used sarcastically, but then a lot of people forgot/missed that particular memo.

[LyleFrancisDelp]

Old episode of “I Love Lucy”. Lucy and Ethel are in London and need directions to see the queen. They ask a stately looking gentleman with and umbrella and a bowler hat for directions. He rattles off something so fast, it’s unintelligible. They ask again and he replies in same. Finally Ethel says, “I’m sorry, we’re American….we don’t understand English.”

[Subtlenimbus]

One that gets me is when someone says, “needs replaced” instead of, “needs to be replaced” or, “needs replacing”.

[santamanone]

The teacher explained that while 2 negatives (“I ain’t never been there”) makes a positive, no case exists where 2 positives make a negative. A Scotsman in the back said, “Aye, right.”

[rogerroger]

I love how there are like 500 different names for rolly pollies, and they're all adorable.

[TechTipsUSA]

1:59 Actually, in many states, the owner of a piece of real property is public information and can be found online; in summary, if you own a house, your address is online.

[MBBurchette]

5:52 - Saw a license plate recently that read “JZZ LUVR” and yes my mind went there. How could it not. 😬

[Gawainer]

This was fun. Here in Boston I grew up with 'r's inserted where they didn't belong and dropped where they did. "I have an idear. Afta I pahk my cah let's eat a tuner fish sandwich while we use the warshing machine."

[MycroftHolmesJr]

Suddenly remembered the Beverly Hillbillies episode where hippies descend upon the Clampett mansion upon hearing that Granny is smoking crawdads.

[hallorette]

“American humans, and children.” Ouch. Glad I’m not a kid anymore.

[enhydralutra]

As someone who uses "I could care less, " I've always said it sarcastically. It's like "we should all be so lucky, " "may you live in interesting times, " or "bless your heart." The meanings of which are different from their literal intention.

[ChurchOfTheHolyMho]

"I'm always sometimes right." Words to live by.

[MisterJimLee]

Dissimilation is when a phoneme changes into something else because it sounds too similar to a neighboring sound. The r-dropping you talk about at 5:08 linguists would call elision, not dissimilation.

You also said that Americans add an 'r' to some words like colonel. Ironically, this actually comes from dissimilation, and not from intrusive-r. Sometime during the evolution of Spanish, if there were multiple Ls or multiple Rs in a word, one would change so they weren't making the same sound over and over. Latin arbor > Spanish árbol. Where Italian has colonello, Spanish has coronelo.
We actually borrowed this pronunciation, but spell it like the French word. The pronunciation with L is a spelling pronunciation that happened later.

[arcticbanana]

"The most common mistake is thinking English is a language. It's actually three languages in a trenchcoat, sneaking about and pocketing any loose vocabulary that looks unattended."

[madeleine]

Just discovered this channel, and as an American who moved to the UK as a kid, I absolutely love it. It's so cathartic seeing a British person give American English its own space to exist and acknowledging that British English falls into a lot of the same behaviours.

For my entire childhood, I was insulted by practically everyone around me, as none of them respected that American English is a different dialect- instead just viewing it as "they can't admit that they speak the language wrong". I was regularly called r*tarded (usually several times a week for my entire adolescence), simply because I would sometimes write "color" instead of "colour". People didn't understand that the United States has had more influences than JUST the UK- most noticeably, influences from Hispanic cultures where "color" is the correct spelling. I tried explaining it to people and they would just call me r*tarded again. I had people who I considered friends berate me and my entire nationality by saying that Americans are mentally disabled because instead of using fancy Latin-derived words like biscuit/autumn/film (amusing because the last is not Latin in origin), "Americans use stupid simplified words like cookie/fall/movie. Hurr durr you cook it so it cookie, leaf fall so it fall, it move so it movie". I had one teacher who would give me 0 on any essay I turned in that had even a *single* American English phrase or spelling, even though SPAG was only meant to account for a small portion of marks and she wouldn't give the same treatment to British students who wrote things like "would of". That's not even getting into the fact that everyone used to call me obese, or insult me over politicians that I didn't elect and couldn't even vote on because I was a minor.

And then people are confused when I say I hate the UK and British people.