We've been rather critical of England during the time we have lived here, right or wrong. Of course, we don't think we're wrong in these criticisms, but it still makes us feel a bit sheepish sometimes. Other times it's just fun and cathartic!
In an attempt to strike a bit of a balance, I am writing a two-part piece about things that are good about England/UK. This segment, Part 1, concerns some things in British society that I agree with. Now, three of these things are shared with Europe, but still.
The Brits are right about...
- The way they pronounce words with the letter "T". Whereas Americans usually soften the T sound to a D sound (budder, wadder, tomado, etc.), the Brits actually pronounce the T as it should be, using the fricative hard T sound like BuTTer, waTer, tomaTo, etc. To my ear, the American pronunciation sounds a bit silly, something that didn't really become clear to me until living here. I've also noticed that Brits sometimes have difficulty understanding words pronounced with the soft D sound, so one ends up having to repeat oneself. Being conscious of this has lead me to pronounce my words with a harder T sound, not quite as hard as the English pronunciation, but somewhere in between. It perhaps sounds a bit Canadian.
- How dates are written. In Europe dates are written Day/Month/Year as opposed to the Month/Day/Year in the US. Why is this "correct"? Because it makes the most sense. The date is expressed in ascending order of incremental value. Think of those Russian dolls. The small one covered by a larger one covered by a larger one and so on. The Day is the smallest doll, the Month second largest, and the Year the largest. It just makes more sense. You wouldn't be able to put the middle-size doll inside the smallest one. Do you know what date Europe has trained itself to write/say incorrectly? 9/11 (which would be the 9th of November here). That's the only exception. When we first moved to Europe we had some problems with K's financial aid because of this. The US student loan company had typed 9/01/03 (September 1st, 2003) on the start date of the loan. When the university in Belgium received this they read it as 9th of January, 2003 which, of course, was a bit of a problem for them since K was due to start in September. A few frantic phone calls back and forth sorted out the confusion.
- The use of the Metric system. Ok, this is cheating a bit because the UK doesn't really use the Metric system fully (but Europe does). They still have their Stones, inches, feet, and miles. But they've at least partially adopted it by using Celsius, metres/centimetres/millimetres (for some things), and litres. Again, it just makes so much more sense to have units of measure that are divisible by 10. Who thought dividing units of length by 12 was a good idea? And don't even get me started on ounces, cups, and gallons! When I use an American recipe, I get annoyed when I have to measure dry ingredients by volume. Did you know a cup of flour can weigh anywhere from 3 to 6 ounces? That's a huge difference! Recipes written in grams and millimetres are so much more accurate. Wonder why your from-scratch cake doesn't quite turn out as it should? Maybe it's because you're measuring flour volumetrically.
If I was allowed to be a despot ruler of the US, I would put the above things into law. Everyone would have to pronounce their T's, write the date correctly, and use the Metric system!
- The PAL video standard. The European video standard is far superior to NTSC, used in North America. While the standard used in the US has 525 lines of horizontal resolution and a clunky 30 "frames" per second display rate, PAL is 625 lines of resolution and 25 "frames" per second, closer to that of film. Furthermore, the color rendition of PAL is better. Bottom line: NTSC is C-R-A-P. Fortunately, this will soon cease to be a concern because everything is going HD, which is one single standard.
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