Rubber?  Does anyone have a rubber I can borrow?” I overheard a girl shout in my studio art class on a rainy Thursday afternoon.  I immediately took out my headphones to ensure I heard right.  Yes, I had heard right.  I dropped my charcoal stick and thought to myself, “Did she really just say that? Did she really just ask for a condom in the middle of art class?”  Little did I know, “rubber” here in the United Kingdom means eraser, which I found out later that day.

I find it intriguing how even though I am in a country where my first language is spoken ubiquitously, I still hit a small linguistic barrier; something I was not expecting.  From that fateful event, I have run into this barrier several times.  In my first week here, we had a quiz with our orientation group and I remember people shouting out “jumper” as an answer to one of the questions.  The first thought that popped into my head was “why are they talking about a movie that was not even rated well?”  Puzzled, I asked my orientation representative what a jumper was; only to find out it was a sweater.

To ensure I did not stick out as an ignorant American again, I wrote down the British words or phrases I learned and what the Minnesotan equivalent is.

One commonly used phrase when greeting a friend is “Are you all right?” This phrase stops me in my tracks every time to really think.  It is the equivalent of Minnesotans nonchalantly asking, “How are you?”  When I hear, “Are you alright?” it usually implies that something is wrong.  Thus, this phrase always stops me, because people kept saying it to me and I kept wondering to myself, “Why do people keep thinking that I’m having a bad day or something is wrong?” This minute linguistic barrier, however, has occurred on the other side as well.

Among the myriad of conversations I have had in the past month, there have been several awkward moments where the person I am talking to did not understand a word or phrase I had said.

During the first two weeks of the term here, I met a multitude of people, constantly introducing myself and explaining all background information, such as where I hail from.  One question that was frequently asked was what year I was in school.  I replied with, “I’m a junior in college.”  Every single time I received the same confused look.  I soon enough learned why.  For one, since most undergraduate schooling in the U.K. is only three years, they do not use the school “class” system such as, sophomore or junior.  This is where the first part of the confusion started.  The second is that the term “college” here is what students call a dorm.  There are no colleges, as in the sense of GAC; there are only Universities or as the Brits like to call it, “Uni.”  Thus, I have had to modify my responses to that question.  I just say, “I’m a third-year” in order to avoid

confusion.  A word that has also caused some confusion here is the common midwestern word, “pop,” when referring to soda.  Here, they use neither pop nor soda; they say, “soft drink.”

Before traveling to Lancaster, I never expected I would encounter these minute language barriers.  One reason I chose to study abroad in the U.K. was to avoid this very problem.  I believe this is because I assumed that the U.K. culture would not be very different from the U.S.  Obviously I was wrong.  While these nuances in linguistics have caused a lot of awkward pauses and “I’m sorry, can you repeat that again?” They have helped me to better understand British culture.  I believe experiencing British culture in person has enriched my life significantly, and it illuminates that one does not have to travel to the “tourist-hot spots” in a country to get the full cultural experience; one just has to notice the little nuances around them in any part of the country to experience the culture and learn from it.