“MINOR DIFFERENCES”

Wairarapa Times-Age, 6 October 1943, Page 5

“MINOR DIFFERENCES”

BRITISH AND AMERICAN SPEECH. By and large, the peoples of the United States and the United Kingdom “talk the same way.” That was the conclusion come to at a recent session of the 8.8.C.’s “Freedom Forum” series (broadcast on short waves) in which ■ Americans and Britons took part. There are however, a few minor differences that sometimes make for confusion. One of the Americans in the studio gave an instance. This was Thomas Eliot, the representative in London of the American Office of War Information. He said he had been walking along Piccadilly, an evening or two before, and noticed a U.S.A, soldier having “a terrible time” stopping passers-by and trying to make himself understood. At last Eliot heard him ask someone: “Say, bud, where do I find the pipe?” It was Only after a certain amount of cross-questioning that the one American discovered that the other wanted what in their country they called the “subway” and what Britons know as the “underground” or the “tube.” It was in trying to arrive at “tube” that the inquirer got as far as “Pipe.”