Double Entendres

I managed to make something of an idiot of myself this week. This all relates to a work colleague based in the USA called Robin. I have never met him or seen a picture of him as most communications have been via email. So it came as a surprise to discover that Robin was actually a woman. Now I am happy enough with the feminine spelling of the name being Robyn but to me “Robin” is the name of a hairy-arsed rugby player from Perth and not a woman from Boston. Americans seem to make a habit of this as can be seen in the names of actresses such as Cameron Diaz, Sean Young or, for that matter, Robin Givens; none of whom are, to my knowledge, either hairy-arsed or rugby players.

There are, in fact, a great number of differences between British and American English that can cause this kind of confusion. I can remember visiting the United States a number of years ago and discovering quite a number of examples over which it is difficult to keep a straight face. Mainly this is because the British are rather puerile and love nothing better than a good, solid, smutty double entendre. For example, the word “spunk” in American English means spirit, pluck, determination and so on whereas in Britain it is a slang term for seminal fluid. This caused huge amusement in a public park in Ohio when a woman protested with her pet dog “Spunky”, a spirited, plucky, determined character of indeterminate breed, as it proceeded to mate with her leg. The precise cause of this amusement was completely lost on our American friends.

Another such misunderstanding came at a baseball game when the subject of a “fanny-pack” came up. Now to me this sounds like some sort of slang expression for a feminine hygiene product but it turns out that “fanny” is the US colloquial phrase for one’s buttocks and a “fanny-pack” is the name of a small bag that is worn around the waist, often rear facing over the buttocks. The more common British name for this is a “bum bag”.

Of course, the phrase “bum bag” would cause confusion in the US as this would seem to describe a battered holdall used to contain the possessions of a poor person of no fixed abode, probably sleeping rough, possibly with some level of alcoholism and certainly a high level of vagrancy – such an individual in the US is referred to as a “bum”. The British colloquial term for such a homeless person is “tramp”. However in the US, a “tramp” is a woman of easy virtue.

This is where it starts to get complicated because, as well as the differing meaning for the word “tramp” there is also another word that Americans use for a prostitute which is the word “hooker”. Although many British people will be familiar with the word “hooker” meaning prostitute from US crime dramas, the word “hooker” in Britain is more commonly used to describe the burley individual who forms the centre point of the scrum in a game of rugby. The “hooker”, in Britain, most likely has a broken nose, cauliflower ears, a hairy arse, lives in Perth and is called Robin.

Of course sometimes the languages can converge. In parts of Northern England, the word “Trump” means a loud, odious and unwelcome emission from an anus. Interestingly, in America, this now means exactly the same thing.