We've decided we're not going to bother to keep our cable TV subscription when we move. It's a waste of money, as we never watch any of the channels we're paying for. The last TV we watched was Frontier House, and that was on PBS.

So last night we made a point of flipping through all the channels to see what we were giving up, and we ended up watching a UK edition of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. It was quite funny, they had little translations of brit-speak at the bottom of the screen. Things like "holiday = vacation" and "gobsmacked = very surprised". They don't seem to give their viewers much credit; surely people could figure out the meaning from the context?

Though I suppose it's true that there are still times when we use certain words or phrases here and later realise that the people who we're talking to haven't a clue what we mean. Sometimes it's the word they're unfamiliar with, sometimes it's the pronunciation. And sometimes we can't figure out what US people are saying. The pronunciation that surprised us most was a colleague of Bobby's referring to a buoy as a "byoo-ee". We pronounce it "boy".

We use a lot of US words these days to avoid confusion - for instance, we now say "trunk" instead of "boot", "gas" instead of "petrol", "cart" instead of "trolley", "cookie" instead of "biscuit" ... but even so, people are still sometimes surprised by our turn of phrase. For instance, a while ago I told someone I'd fetch her son from youth group. She thought that was amusing, apparently they wouldn't say "fetch", they'd say "pick up", whereas we'd be comfortable using either word. You can tell when you use a word that people think is strange, because they generally smirk to themselves, and then use the word themselves in the next sentence.

Me : So you think the air-conditioner looks a bit dodgy?
Home Inspector Guy : (Chortle). Yes. Definitely a bit dodgy. You need to look at their service records. I'd say it's (meaningful pause) dodgy all right. (Chortle).

Navigating the whole house-buying thing has been an exercise in new vocabulary, since all the terms are different. "Realtor" instead of "estate agent", "mortgage" instead of "bond", and I don't even know what they call conveyancing fees here ...

Oh, and speaking of the new house, we realised something nice about it : we can walk to the library. It's a pleasant, leafy stroll - probably about a mile and a half. It'd make a nice bike ride, too. Can't walk to the grocery store, though, which is a shame.