I you were a Brit in the USA………..

YOU MIGHT BE GOING NATIVE IF….
Language

* You have started Americanising the pronunciation of your Rs in order to get understood on the phone.
* Writing the month before the day no longer seems weird and unnatural.
* You call shops “stores”.
* You call petrol gas.
* You go to the movies instead of the flicks (or cinema to the youngsters) which is, of course, in a theatre.
* You talk about taking the elevator instead of the lift.
* You chomp ice (is this a Texan thing or more widespread?)
* You stop asking for rubbers when you want an eraser.
* You wear a sweat-shirt with B.U.M. Equipment written across it.
* You pronounce aluminium as aluminum.
* You start to pronounce the W’s and H’s in place names…Warwick…Birmingham etc.
* You greet people with…. Hey! How ya dooin! Or… Hey… How’s it goin’?
* You find yourself saying… “you becha..!!” instead of “yes”
* You stop telling people you’ll knock them up in the morning
* You call a bumbag a fannypack.
* You have stopped trying to bum a ### off a friend.
* You talk routinely of taking a sack/brown bag lunch to the office.
* You wonder what a “bin liner” is.
* It strikes you forcibly that Brit. pop stars sound American when they sing, but not when they speak.
* Your name is Katy but you’ve given in and started to pronounce your name as “Kady” in order to be understood. (Otherwise you get called Casey!)
* You wait in line, rather than queue
* You spell stuff like “center”
* You know that asking for ski pants with braces will get you very weird stares.
* You start to say Zee instead of Zed (although you still think Zed because it’s better than Zee, which sounds like “c” over the phone)
* You understand that “liberal” means “left-wing”
* “Ringing your Dad” takes on a whole new meaning, as does “dragging on a ###.”
* You stop saying self-effacing, apologetic things like I’m sorry about that, I’m afraid that, Forgive me, I hope you don’t mind, as conversational filler. (Sorry about that)
* You understand that “interesting” usually means “unpleasant” or “disturbingly unusual”.
* You call university “school.”
* You would never say “Have a nice day” yourself, but you no longer have any kind of knee-jerk reaction when someone says it to you.
* The word “blimey” sounds IMPOSSIBLY peculiar.
* You are occasionally rendered totally immobile by internal panic when you lose track: Chips are crisps, no, french fries are chips, no chips are cookies, er.. cookies are biscuits, er.. biscuits are hard and crunchy and sweet… er no, er .. biscuits are what you mop up your gravy with… English muffins are impossible to find in England… er the First floor is the ground floor… no… it’s the second floor… the scampi is a prawn… a shrimp is a lobster tail.. a prawn is a shrimp…
* You learn to use the article “the” when going to THE hospital.
* You giggle when asked to “pass a napkin.”
* You start calling holidays vacations.
* The word “dude” passes your lips without a conscious effort.
* Trunk and hood come to mind rather than boot and bonnet.
* You understand that dummy refers more to a lame brain than to something you stick in a baby’s mouth.
* You have forgotten what a wardrobe is.
* You only use the word “brilliant” to describe shiny objects, or intelligent people
* You say “Period” instead of “Full Stop.”
* You may be a racist. But you stopped being a racialist a long time ago. (Ahh… but are you a sexist or a sexualist?)
* Y’All sounds like a perfectly reasonable form of address.

Politics

* You go in for politics and you “run” for office, instead of “standing” for election. (I always thought that was a very significant difference).
* You take it as a matter of course that all politicians, lawyers and cops are corrupt. (Tho’ that’s increasingly the assumption Britside too, I suspect).
* You have forgotten that politicians outside the USA usually resign when faced with a major scandal.
* You embrace racial politics as the national pastime.
* You can no longer remember the name of the UK Prime Minister, but you vaguely remember someone saying he has a lot in common with Bill Clinton. Both youngish, both married to lawyers and both in the UK during the Vietnam War.

Media

* You no longer listen to the BBC on that Radio Shack short-wave radio you bought just after you arrived.
* You’ve resorted to putting a sticker on the back of the TV remote, which lists alphabetically all the channels and their numbers.
* You feel that you should go on national T.V to tell millions of people about an embarrassing problem.
* You no longer even notice how many ghastly commercials there are on TV. (Or how staid they are).
* You try to escape the appalling commercials by using them as a trigger to change the channel. Result: you forget what you were watching in the first place, you’re now surfing.
* You are growing accustomed to the awful US comedy shows (what do their writers do after the age of seven?).
* You are now used to the US news “anchors” who are chosen according to two criteria: good looks and lack of intellect.
* It never occurs to you that anyone could possibly seek to define you by the newspaper you read.
* You pick up a UK tabloid and simply can’t fathom how 90% of this crap is in the paper. You read it anyway.
* You pick up a UK “heavy” newspaper and simply can’t fathom how 90% of THIS crap is in the paper. You read it anyway.
* You have stopped subscribing to UK newspapers.
* The first section you turn to in the Sunday Paper is the funnies.
* You realise that you have to buy the Wall Street Journal if you want an egregious editorial slant.
* You have given up on the US media and have turned to the foreign press to find out what is going on in Washington. D.C