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I started reading Harry Potter when I was seven years old and had never seen The Great British Bake Off, Peep Show,<\/i> or The IT Crowd<\/i>. I was an American who didn’t know what a \u201clift\u201d or a \u201cboot\u201d was and had never heard the word \u201cdodgy.\u201d Mostly I just used context clues, figured it out, and moved on with my life.<\/p>\n
But there were times when I came across words whose meanings escaped me entirely. I spent whole years of my life skipping over them and never looking them up because, I don’t know? Because I thought I was better than that? Because J.K. Rowling trusted me to be familiar with British culture and I didn’t want to admit that I wasn’t? We’ll never know. Anyway, these are those words.<\/p>\n
1. Budgerigar Harry opened his eyes. If they had reached water-skiing budgerigars, there was nothing else worth hearing.”<\/em><\/p>\n I do not have the clarity of language to tell you how shocked I was to learn that a budgerigar is simply what people in the U.K. call a parakeet. I was picturing a badger. A water-skiing badger is hilarious. A water-skiing parakeet, however? I just don’t know how to feel about that.<\/p>\n 2. Wotcher This one plagued me for years. But it wasn’t until I started writing this very article that I finally got around to Googling it and discovering that \u201cWotcher!\u201d is an old informal greeting, possibly Cockney in origin, possibly a contraction of \u201cwhat cheer.\u201d<\/p>\n 3. Tea cozy This one is less about British culture and more about me being a fundamentally flawed human being. I don’t drink tea. I don’t even mess with coffee. The closest I have ever come is hot chocolate, which I make with water rather than milk, eager as I am to be universally hated. So when we were told Dobby was using a tea cozy as a hat, I had no inkling of what a tea cozy was or why he shouldn’t be wearing one on his head. If pressed, I suppose I would have guessed it was a sweater for teacups, and I’m not entirely convinced that it’s not.<\/p>\n 4. Candyfloss Candyfloss sounds EXACTLY like the sort of charming wizard nonsense you’d find in Honeydukes alongside licorice wands, No-Melt Ice Cream, and Chocolate Frogs. I thought it was like dental floss, but edible and delicious. I did not think it was just what everyone in the U.K. calls cotton candy, and I have to say I’m disappointed.<\/p>\n 5. Treacle, trifle, and tripe Look, I know that these things are not unique to the U.K., but I do not have a sophisticated palate. I subsist primarily on a diet of tacos, Captain Crunch, and whatever’s in the fridge that’s about to expire. I know what treacle, trifle, and tripe are now<\/i>, of course, but when I was a dumb kid, they were just words to me. I figured they were foodstuffs, given that people were constantly eating them, but I had no mental picture with which to work.<\/p>\n 6. Fug Did you know \u201cfug\u201d is just an informal, mostly British word for \u201ca stuffy or malodorous emanation\u201d? I did not know \u201cfug\u201d is just an informal word for \u201ca stuffy or malodorous emanation.\u201d I truly believed this was a typo, and I believed this for longer than I care to admit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I started reading Harry Potter when I was seven years old and had never seen The Great British Bake Off, Peep Show, or The IT Crowd. I was an American who didn’t know what a continue reading<\/span>
\n<\/b>Example: “‘<\/em>And finally, Bungy the budgie has found a novel way of keeping cool this summer. Bungy, who lives at the Five Feathers in Barnsley, has learned to water-ski! Mary Dorkins went to find out more…’<\/i><\/p>\n
\n<\/b>Example: \u201cWotcher, Harry!\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n
\n<\/b>Example: \u201c[Dobby] was wearing a tea cozy for a hat, on which he had pinned a number of bright badges\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n
\n<\/b>Example: \u201cSlightly cross-eyed, with shoulder-length white hair the texture of candyfloss, he wore a white cap\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n
\n<\/b>Examples: various<\/p>\n
\n<\/b>Example: \u201cThe misty fug his breath had left on the window sparkled in the orange glare of the streetlamp outside\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n