Being a Canadian transplant here in London, I’m used to stopping conversation mid-stream when I get that glazed look for using a word a local doesn’t know. Then we start the list of nouns game until I hit on one they know. Sometimes we get all the way to miming if there’s no shared word for what I’m trying to explain. It’s sort of like backwards charades.
I’ve been here two years now, so it doesn’t happen nearly as often, but with my cello teacher, there’s a whole new batch of words I don’t know. ‘Manuscript’ was one – we always said ‘staff paper’, or the not very succinct ‘blank music paper with staffs on it’. But because I’ve always been a woodwind player, I don’t know a lot of the strings vocabulary, Canadian or otherwise. Whenever I was lent to the orchestra in school for concerts I just tuned out when the director was berating the strings for something in rehearsal.
My cello teacher also has a just-outside-London accent with some funny East Anglian twists to it (where he went to university) so occasionally I just don’t know what he’s saying at all. When he was explaining the concept of wolfs, I thought he was saying ‘woofs’ until about three days ago.
