Do Americans understand British English?

[knickernicker]

I can't think that there is any American phrase, word or accent that I wouldn't understand, but I wonder if an American would understand everything I say.
I remember sitting for a meal with some people from Boston and being acutely aware of needing to edit what I said to remove any British idiom. It was an odd feeling as when watching American films I forget they're a different nationality.

Keatsie- "tidy" means good, there was a guitar shop in Haverfordwest that had "tidy like" in lights in the window every Christmas. Made me laugh a lot. Cracking means really good, lovely etc.

From another thread, what British people call hair straighteners, we in the US call a flat iron. It seems funny to think of it as a plural thing, but there are two surfaces like scissors, so it makes sense.

Oh, that's weird. I always wondered what a flat iron was.

American kids also take heart-shaped cookies in for the class - my mum made me do this in England leading to intense embarrassment all through primary school.

Plenty of US phrases that Brits don't get, or think they do but don't quite. Ballpark figure - colleagues had no idea what a ballpark was. Funnel cake. Rain check. Will-call desk. (i don't want to call later, I want to collect my theater tickets now!) Homecoming.

Definitely. I know the meaning of rain check but I didn't know what it meant until I read it in one of those articles online. Again ballpark figure I know the meaning of but not sure of the origin of the phrase - baseball related? The other three, I have no idea.

A flat iron is what people use to press clothes, after laundering, to get the creases and wrinkles out.

Now almost universally superseded by the steam iron.

It is made of iron, and flat, hence the name, with a handle on the top.

flat iron

Scone, that's interesting re flat irons. My granny (born 1902, Scotland) used to "straighten" her hair with the iron! Not an electric one, obv, one heated on the stove, but it was also called a flatiron, same shapeish as a modern one.

Xpost with PigletJohn. :)

Lots of things called flatiron

DD1 (my American daughter) lives in Manhattan now & that Flatiron Building is her absolute favourite

(Any other Brits on this thread having to resist the urge to start putting eg favorite? )

"Bangs", I educated my hairdresser to say fringe!
"Hot" seemed to be the descriptive word for an attractive person.
"Good to go"= ready.
"All set" = ready.
The things I really missed were a really good swear, but DS could be relied on for that, and the pleasures of pointless speculative conversation, although I did watch Fox News sometimes!
I did read an article in the Washington Post about how fed up some people were with the term "African American" since they'd never been near Africa and they just wanted to be called American.

After all, are black Africans called African-Africans? Or white Africans called European-Africans?

I think not...

The context is important. By long usage, Americans of European extraction often used (and still use) a hyphenated or double-barreled designation, Irish-American, Italian-American, etc., but the terms used for black people did not reference origin and they were the terms adopted primarily by white people. The development of the term was part of the changing language of the Civil Rights Movement; it was to denote with pride an African origin. Many black people prefer to be called black rather than African American when a designation is used, but polls have shown that most are fine with either.

Scone, I did think that about eg Italian-American after I'd posted!

But otoh, Italy & Ireland are countries. Africa is a continent with thousands of different tribal allegiances. It's a bit of a minefield, isn't it?

I've lived in Britain 20+ yrs & only recenly discovered that Brits have wheel trims rather than hubcaps

eh? we have hubcaps - I've never heard the term 'wheel trim' ... though most nice cars have 'alloys' now I suppose.

In the early days of 'PC-speak' in the US, a colleague somehow managed to refer to my pet as a 'canine American'. er.... he was a british born and bred dachshund .

I haven't seen a car with actual hub caps for years

They do have wheel trims now, Errol. Honest. Different altogether

at canine American.

TheOne That's a good point, but many African Americans did not and do not know where in Africa their ancestors came from. That is changing with more sources for genealogical research including genetic testing.

My first car was a 1962 Triumph Herald - it had hubcaps (small chrome saucer-type things that literally capped the hubs)

Nowadays cars have wide plastic things, designed to look a bit like alloys, which cover the whole wheel - those are wheel-trims

While I am on the subject, many first nations Americans (to use the Canadian term) prefer to be called American Indian rather than Native American partly because it is the only double barreled designation that puts American first.

People's origins must be harder & harder to define anyway as individuals of different heritage intermarry - if an Italian-American marries an Irish-American, what do their kids call themselves? Italian-Irish-American?

& if those kids then marry eg a Chinese-American or Japanese-American or Hispanic-American or a completely non-American immigrant...?

Where does it all end?

I don't tend to examine cars in great detail so I didn't realise that there were 'fake alloys' now... but I do still quite regularly see fallen-off hubcaps by the side of the road.

they're not hubcaps, they're wheel trims.

(and what you used to call hub caps on, say, a Morris Minor, are technically nave plates. You probably have hub caps which you can see when you take the front wheels off, they are fixed to the car, not the wheel, about 50mm dia. The seal the grease in the wheel bearings).

I think we just use separate hyphenated designations, TheOne. I am Scottish-American, Anglo-American, and Irish-American.

I'm a quarter Irish but just say British (or English, if pressed ) - what would you say, Scone? All of that, or just 'American'?