English-English: Hash, Gash, and Stone

As every Bridget Jones fan (such as me) would attest, North American-English differs quite a bit from English-English. You know; washroom vs. loo, trunk vs. boot, and so on. Knowing this, I was still mollified by the sheer diversity when I moved to Germany, where the English of choice is of the British variety.

I received my awakening shortly after the move, when I needed to leave a message on hubby’s cell/mobile phone. I got the usual spiel: “You have just reached the O2 voice mailbox of (…) After the tone, record your message. To end, press hash, or hang up.”

What hubby would later hear is my short message, followed by some cursing whilst I pressed several random buttons. The problem was that I did not know what the hash key was. Was I supposed to look for a button on the telephone with a hemp plant on it? Or perhaps a button with a hash brown on it? Turns out that what I knew as the pound key is called the hash key by the Brits. Am I the only person in world that calls it the number sign key?
NB – I realise that the pound key would have been the logical choice. My mind, however, was at the time fried from the information overload familiar to amateur expats everywhere.

My next lesson on English-English came from hubby, who told me you do not call garbage garbage in the UK. You call it gash. Is that not a large, bleeding, cut wound? Not in the UK!

Then there is the measurement of weight in stone. Do bathroom scales in the UK tell weight loss in brimstone or granite? I was always tickled by this. We are living in the digital age, yet the Brits give the impression that they still hang out with Fred Flintstone. In fact, I purposely did not learn how that system works, so as to not lose the image of Wilma standing on a digital scale...
Fred: Honey you look great!
Wilma: Thanks, but I didn’t lose 4 stone like I hoped… I only lost 2 stone and 2 pebbles…