Avoiding
Total Confusion and Possible Aggravated Assault
There's
nothing new here that wasn't already included on other pages of this site,
but I thought it might be useful to include a recap of the words that
mean something completely different in British English than in American
English. In the interests of space (and in the interests that I want to
go to bed and finish up this thing), I am not going to be funny here in
the slightest. Any humor you get out of the following list, therefore,
is your own.
I also do this to,
I hope, prove a point. I have tried my best to make this entertaining
and to get a few laughs out of you. If I did my job well enough and you
did indeed find it amusing, than the following can be said.
Perhaps you found
one of the 'dictionary' entries you have just read in the previous sections
absolutely hilarious, or at least mildly amusing and worth a moderate
chuckle. You may find that same words and its meaning becomes totally
flat and devoid of humor below where it is just a brief blip in a bland,
lifeless list.
In this same way,
traveling without a good sense of humor firmly in place in your mental
luggage is as bad as, if not worse than, forgetting, say, clean underwear
or your traveler's cheques. If you keep your sense of humor about you,
then you will be able to look back on the fact that you forgot your underwear
and cheques and laugh (well, maybe not so hard about the traveler's cheques).
Perhaps you'll even
write down the experience of it, or just share it as a topic of conversation
8 months later with a few friends; one of those stories that starts out,
"Oh, have I got a story for you! Listen to what happened to me in London
when I finally decided to throw my three-day-old underwear away. Now you
must understand that all of the clothing stores in England were closed
for a week for this special British holiday to honor the Protestant patron
saint of neckties..." You will laugh, your friends will laugh...in short,
you will have truly enjoyed your trip.
On the other hand,
if you were so hell-bent on enjoying your vacation at any cost that every
little mishap, unforseen change of plans, or unavoidable misunderstanding
was seen as a horrible headache and a dark blot on your precious vacation
time (two weeks a year, if you're lucky), your trip will have been totally
wasted and worthless just a bunch of photographs of famous monuments
and maybe a postcard or two.
It is the experiences
of travel and the memories that those experiences leave in your mind that
will stay with you for the rest of your life. Those photographs you save
in a laminated album are not what your trip was all about. They are merely
bookmarks, pictorial references that, when you look at them, trigger a
response, a memory of that time and that place and what was going on that
day.
"Look, Marge," you
can say, with the wry grin of amused and strangely cherished memory on
your face as you crack open a page of your photo album five years later.
"Here's me...
...standing in front of Buckingham Palace...
...with no underwear on."
That's all I have
to say. Here's the list of terms. Have a safe, fun, and above all very
interesting trip.
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