Well living here for a while means you get to notice all the quirky little differences between life here and back home in the UK. I’ve already written about the linguistic oddities and will no doubt be covering that ground again. But there are loads of  things that are peculiarly American.

For example take sporting fixtures and the way they are described. Back home (and in most places around the world I’m guessing) we would see an upcoming Premiership fixture described in the media as, for example, Man United v Burnley. In other words home team first and the convention is to use the recognised club names.  Now over here they do it differently; no matter what the sport they always describe it with the away team first playing at (or rather @) somewhere.  And since every sporting team has a nickname in the title such as the New York ‘Yankees’, they always seem to set the fixture by the nicknames alone. So you get the fixture presented as Yankees @ White Sox (I’ve no idea if these two teams would actually play against each other but you get the point).

Now this is fine for the locals because they are used to it. But it takes a bit of getting used to as a Limey.  We get to see most Premiership and big footie matches on the TV here (thanks to Shay’s laptop!). But looking through the schedules it’s easy to miss a match. For example a recent game was listed as Citizens @ Cherries.  At first glance I passed it off as a baseball fixture or something.  It wasn’t until I had a second look that I realised they were covering  Bournemouth’s home match against Man City.

Americans eh. They’ve always got to be bloody different.

FBP