n chutes and ladders. The simple board game in which you roll dice and, depending on which square you land on, you can go whizzing further up the board on ladders or slide down the board on snakes.
The Letter S
n ditto; me too: Do you know, I think I slept with that guy in my first year of university. / Oh god! Snap!
v make out; French kiss: I had a couple too many beers and ended up snogging the bouncer.
n bar of soap. To a Brit, soap is specifically the soap you use to wash yourself in the bath, not something you’d use to wash clothes or dishes.
1 n, v, adj generic word signifying displeasure. Attached to any word or phrase it has the immediate effect of making it derogatory. Sod off get lost. sod you bite me. sod it damn it; forget it. old sod old git, etc, etc. Use at will – it has a friendly tone to it and is unlikely to get you into trouble. 2 n a lump of turf (universal).
n strips of bread meant for dipping into a boiled egg. And yes, Brits also use the word to describe people who are in the army. To the best of my knowledge this duality of meaning has never caused any enormous problems.
n lawyer. In the U.K. it has nothing (well, on one level at least) to do with prostitutes or door-to-door salesmen.
n a game played alone on a sort of four-pointed-star board full of pegs in little holes, where the idea is to remove pegs by jumping other pegs over the top of them, ultimately with the intention of ending up with a single peg left on the board in the middle. Traditionally, the Brits refer to card games one plays alone as “patience” rather than “solitaire” but Microsoft has gone a fair way to changing that.
adj sorted-out: You’ve got it? Great. Sorted. I am ninety-nine percent sure that this originated in a drugs context, a view only strengthened by the existence of a Pulp song entitled Sorted for ‘E’s and Whiz.
1 n wrench. 2 adj A very mild friendly insult: Bob’ll be a bit late; the spanner left his phone in a taxi.
adj at one’s wits end; mad: I’ve been trying to get this working all morning and it’s driving me spare!
n a suet pudding with raisins in it, often served on festive occasions and with custard. And yes, the Brits do use “dick” to mean the same thing Americans do.
n small child. My father used to refer to myself and my brothers as “Sprog One,” “Sprog Two” and “Sprog Three.” Perhaps that says more about my family than the English language. At least I got to be Sprog One. Were my father Australian he might have chosen some different phrasing as to an Aussie “sprog” is what the rest of the world calls semen.
n brackets. Something went very wrong at some point in history. Nobody knows what it was, but the end result of it was that, to Brits, [these] are square brackets, and (these) are “brackets”. To Americans, [these] are “brackets” and (these) are “parentheses”. Even {these} ended up being “braces” to Americans but “curly braces” to Brits. It’s possible many people have died as a result of these confusions, although I can’t exactly work out how.
n cordial; diluted fruit drink. It’s a little outdated – you’d be more likely to find your grandmother offering you “lemon squash” than you would your children. The vegetable that Americans call a “squash,” Brits call a “marrow.”
adj pear-shaped. Pretty much anything that’s gone wrong. Often, but not exclusively, used to refer to one’s state of sobriety: Deirdre’s mother was looking a bit squiffy towards the end, it’s a good job we left when we did.
n training wheels. The little extra set of wheels that your parents put on your bicycle to stop you from falling off all the time when you’re learning to ride. My parents never got any… I think they secretly enjoyed watching me injure myself in the name of learning.
n bachelor party. The groom’s pre-wedding lads’-night-out party. It generally involves drinking as much alcohol as possible and trying to do something embarrassing to the husband-to-be. This is great fun for all of the groom’s buddies, but less fun for the groom as he almost inevitably wakes up the next morning completely naked and tied to a lamppost somewhere in a foreign country. Brides secretly like stag nights because it gives them a good excuse for refusing to let their husbands see their friends again.