#lostinthepond

#lostinthepond

Social Etiquette: Britain vs. AmericaLaurence Brown grew up in the UK but lives in the US now. His YouTube video series called Lost in the Pond explains the differences he notices between the two nations. In the latest video, he contrasts how Brits and Yanks do social occasions. The subject came up after the viral discovery that families in Sweden don't find it necessary to include guests in their meals. Brown says that varies from home to home in Britain. The joke used to be that if someone offers to serve British food to you, you should go home immediately. But since Brown has moved to the US, the British national cuisine has become takeout curry, so the old jokes about awful English food have faded away. Still, he has a lot of wry observances about how Americans and the British differ in the way we socialize around food and drink. If you're not already familiar with Lost in the Pond, here's a recent video explaining how Brown ended up as the internet's foremost British-American translator.

British Man Tries to Guess Regional American Slang TermsLaurence Brown is a British man who married an American woman and moved to the US. In 2015, he started a video series called Lost in the Pond in which he shares his observations on the differences between the US and Britain. Later, he moved from the East Coat to the Midwest and found out that America is different from even itself because of all the space between the different regions. This month, he's challenged himself to guess the meaning of slang terms used in different regions of the US. He started with the South. That's a fraught dialect, since "buggy" has about a dozen meanings, but shopping cart would be at the top. "Druthers" is definitely a portmanteau, but it stands for "I would rather" and was not only mashed together, but also turned into a noun somewhere along the way. And it was the name of a short-lived fast food chain, too. Oh yeah, the other word for "doohickey" he was trying to think of is "gizmo." And now Brown wants to go mudding.