YOU were on the cusp of middle age before you realised what exactly a ‘semester’ was. These still confuse:
Biscuits
Our biscuits are their cookies, so what the f**k are their biscuits? Apparently they’re eaten with gravy in the South, which sounds ominous. In fact they’re bread. Wait, so they’re eating bread and gravy?
Fanny
A safe-for-work version of ass, confused by Americans wearing fanny packs on the front where the fanny is. Means that over there they have no idea what a ‘fanny fart’ is, even though they could refer to it as a ‘f**k trump’.
Nightstand
Sounds like a perch that a raven could sit on before croaking some word or other. It is a bedside table. Why? They don’t call tables ‘foodstands’.
Beer nuts
Stephen King characters were always shovelling beer nuts into their faces at bars. Are they beer-soaked? Beer-roasted? No. It means ‘any kind of nuts kept in a bowl on the bar’.
40s
‘Blunt’ has travelled across the Atlantic, but its companion ‘40’ remains a hip-hop mystery. It’s a two-and-a-bit pint bottle of malt liquor, which only raises the question, ‘WTF is malt liquor?’
Sophomore
At some point in the American education system, everyone becomes a sophomore. Why? Is it like those bullshit fraternity-sonority things they have? Do they transform physically? They’re just second-years.
Pacifier
Assumed, given the prevailing logic over there, to be a gun. But then troublingly often associated with babies, and presumably they’re not arming infants yet? Actually a dummy.
Faucet and spigot
The f**k? Kids in Sweet Valley High books were always drinking from the faucet. In your late 20s you realised it was just a tap. So what’s a spigot? A tap outside. That needed its own special word?
Shop class
Do badly at high school and you’re in shop class. This makes sense because there’s f**loads of shops just in New York, let alone the rest, and someone needs to run them. Except it’s actually design and technology, making key-holders.
Chips
We’re all enlightened now thanks to the sterling work done by Kettle Chips. Which America doesn’t have. But then what are chips? They have fries but they’re fries. Don’t they have chips? Poor bastards.
