European Slang

A cookie is a cookie... a biscuit is a biscuit... or is it? 

In the two and half or so months I've been traveling in Australia I've had to wildly adjust my vocabulary and vernacular. Aussies, English, and Europeans in general, but especially the first two, love to shorten words, create nicknames, and generally call everything something other than what it actually is. Some of it makes sense and is easy to catch on (example: lets get pissed = lets get drunk). Some of it makes no fucking sense at all and will never catch on no matter how long I'm here for. An  example of this is Biscuits, not the warm, flakey, delicious kind you cover in white gravy, the kind you dip in a glass of cold milk (i.e. cookies). Europeans love their biscuits, it suprises me that they are not the fattest countries in the world, that's how many biscuits they eat. But I guess when you consider that McDonald's (Mackers) has no dollar menu over here (I was starving the other night and paid $12 for a quarter pounder with a small fries and drink) that might explain why Americans still hold the "Fatty" crown. 

Everything is shortened, no word is what it is, and if it is a full word that makes sense it's probably not actually that at all but a slang for something else. Ginger Ale is Dry, and if you ask for a Jack and Ginger you'll probably get it with a Ginger Beer which is something else all together. Now as a traveler I can't expect the rest of the world to conform to all our American Jargon but sometimes it seems like they are making shorter words just for the sake of doing it. Overall it keeps things interesting and keeps me constantly say, "What?", "Wait what?", "Oh... oh ok I get it... ya sure what you said". 

The other thing I've found is that (and this is not always true but about 50% of the time), English people speak terrible, and I mean terrible fucking English. It almost seems sometimes like they're doing really bad impersonations of a cockney accent, but no that's really how they talk. Think Brad Pitt in Snatch, "He's not English, he's not Irish, he's just piker". Which side note don't tell an English person they sound like a piker, they don't like that very much. For all the different countries of people I've met here traveling, some who English is their second, or even third language, I'd say I have the hardest time understanding people from the UK. Just saying there's a reason we broke off, maybe it was because nobody could understand King George, and they just said, "Fuck it let's start our own country". And that ladies and gents is the real story of how 'Merica began... Fuck ya!