Hold on to that feelin'

I’m a really terrible dancer. Like, the worst. When I dance I look like a spastic monkey having a seizure. It’s a pretty terrible sight, and I always feel the need to apologize for inflicting it on the poor people around me.

That doesn’t mean I can bring myself to stop, though. Which is unfortunate, I know, but what can you do? Sometimes the music just hits full force and I can feel it strumming on my soul, and it’d be sacrilege to ignore it. Music transcends nationalities and other differences, especially if you can let yourself heed the call, uninhibited, for a little while at least.

I’ve been in London for about three months now, and I still love it, even if I had so many problems signing up for classes- I literally didn’t know what classes I was up for until a week into school. But the students are all really cool, especially my floor (the party floor, not unlike freshman year, which I admit I love). While other friends of mine from back home are living in households with adorable old retired couples and quickly learning French or Spanish, I find that I’m learning the language here too, though unlike my friends, I can’t exactly use it. Why? Well, the whole purpose of, say, living in France with a French family is to learn French, especially all the little idiosyncrasies and dialectical differences that make it more authentic, giving you a full experience.

With English, on the other hand, it’s already my native language, even if I do use a different version of it. When talking about all the differences in spelling (color = colour, for example) I couldn’t argue with one kid’s reasoning- “It’s our language- ENGLISH as in ENGLAND- you stole it from US, you can’t complain,” although I still think a lot of our spelling is easier. There are just so many new words I’m learning, I feel like I’m in an alternate universe with much better slang. As much as I like these new additions, I can’t exactly use them in everyday vocabulary. Why? Cause I’d feel like a pretentious douchenozzle. So here’s my list:

English Words I Wish I Could Use Without Sounding Like A Douchenozzle

1. Dodgy (sketchy) usage: That’s the dodgy alleyway where a squatter got attacked by another squatter wielding a crowbar.

1. Cheers (thanks, see ya) usage: Oh hey, it’s been a nice night out at the pub, I can’t walk in a straight line but thanks for the good time, cheers mate.
2. Mate (friend, amigo) usage: I will punch someone in the face to defend my mates.
3. Hench (buff, juiced up) usage: So, let me get this straight, you’d define guidos as being really tan and super hench to the point of illegal steroid use?
4. Knackered (drunk) usage: I got so knackered last night I didn’t notice when someone started drawing on me in permanent marker, and only woke up this morning to find most of these drawings are obscene.
5. Bin (garbage can) usage: That week-old cheese should just go directly into the bin, please don’t actually eat it or worse, throw it at people.
6. Slag (skank) usage: She’s such a slag, she's gone through all of Hampstead.
7. Chav (someone who wears the hoop earrings, white sneakers, etc. you know what i mean) usage: Lady Sovereign’s a bit of a chavette, she wears the massive earrings and shiny shoes.
8. Trousers (pants, cause pants here is different) usage: Someone got passion fruit on my trousers, and they’re all stained now.
9. Fringe (bangs) usage: I slept with my headband covering my forehead, I’ve been using my fringe all day to cover up the mark the indentation made on my face.
10. Lorry (truck) usage: I can’t get hit by a lorry, I have things to do. Note: Do NOT use semi here. It means something completely different, with a different pronunciation. Found that out the hard way on google images.
11. Nicked (stole) usage: I nicked this hat from a random guy at the pub, and decided to take it with me to the club.
12. Rubbish (garbage) usage: Those old shoes are absolutely rubbish, really, you should just throw them in the bin.
13. Bloody (oh come on, you know this one) usage: It’s bloody cold out here, since god forbid London ever gets some sun.
14. Git (idiot) usage: He led us to the wrong tube station, ack, what a git.
15. Chunder (vomit, gross, right?) usage: You don’t really want me to use chunder in a sentence, do you?
16. Holiday (vacation) usage: Yeah, we’ve been on holidays all around the world. What? This is your first time ever leaving the continental US? Oh.

Then there are English slang words that I don’t WANT to use. For example, fag means something completely different here than in the US. While at the Blue Post, this wonderful place where we listen to an amazing live performer, Bee, the singer, had one more song. “Guys, it’s been lovely playing for you this evening, but I have to go on my fag break for fifteen minutes.” There was a pause as I found myself physically cringing, I hate that word no matter what the context. “Oh wait!” she started, “I really need to stop saying that, since I heard in America it’s a really bad word.” I only wish some Americans were aware.

When I’m in public, I generally shy away from using the peace sign, hand facing inward, because it makes you look like a douchebag. People who generally pose for pictures like that on a habitual, non-ironic basis are generally people I don’t want to know. But in England, it’s flat out obscene. Waving two fingers at someone like that is worse than flipping the bird, something that I’m still not used to, and can’t quite wrap my head around. I’ve always associated it with obnoxious frat boys posing for group photos or spikey-haired guidos taking a break from fist-pumping (yeah, I miss Jersey Shore, and will make as many references as possible). I’m secretly glad that here it’s just not acceptable.

Slang goes both ways, though. When I mentioned that I can’t use “mates” without sounding like an idiot, a friend of mine here claimed they can’t say “dude.” I’ve never heard an English person here use the word “dude” yet, which is slightly amazing, considering how much I find myself using it. Just a random exclamation- “Dude! Did you see that guy faceplant drunkenly on the table!” doesn’t work among the Brits. So while I miss saying “mates,” I’m sort of glad I can keep my “dude.” Even if that too, makes me sound like a douchebag.

Accents are a funny thing. An entire group of people share this language identity just due to region and community. I read somewhere that in the age of the internet and globalization, accents are actually getting STRONGER, as if to reinforce the shared identity we get when we actually do speak to each other. I’m getting more and more used to the English accent, to the point where I’m asking people to repeat things to a minimum now, and sometimes just plain don’t even notice. It no longer takes me a few tries to pay attention to what the person is actually saying because I’m too busy just listening to the lilts of their dialect.

Sometimes I like to imitate my English friends, and sometimes I can be pretty decent at it, though others I crash and burn. I always ask permission before I start repeating everything the people around me are saying like a supremely annoying parrot. Part of it goes back to the first night I met most of the people in my building, and one American kid, who was not-so-affectionately dubbed “Drunky” after he dove headfirst into enjoying the lower drinking age, refused to speak in anything but his warped idea of what an English accent sounds like. Between throwing up on the floor of the pub and pounding back other people’s drinks, he supremely annoyed and offended a lot of the English kids by mixing some random form of Scottish, Australian, Irish, and Borat.

So, I always ask for permission before I start copying all the different accents. Of course, sometimes this means that my friends make me say obscene things in the name of getting me to repeat it in an English accent. Sometimes they complain that I make them sound “stuck-up.” But most of the time it’s fun, since I wish I had an English accent.

Surprisingly, many of my English friends claim to wish they had American accents. Imitating me, they’ll say, in my dorky Midwestern accent, “Hai, I’m Anne Wimmer, I’m from WisCONsin.” Too bad they didn’t get someone with a normal American accent, and have to make do with the weird Milwaukee hybrid I have. I’ve become more aware of the distinctly American things I say, like “Oh that sucks” and “It’s really killer funny.” Americans speak slower than Brits, to the point where I get impatient with myself when I’m speaking, since I’m used to hearing fast paced, tumbling over each other, British.

Some things are still universal though. Music, first and foremost. There’s nothing more fun than dancing, no matter how spastically, on the second floor of a pub to an awesome singer. From the basements in Wisconsin with my high school friends, to the karaoke bars of Koreatown in New York City with my Fordham friends, to the streets of London with my English friends, one song comes back to haunt me over and over again.

It’s a song about a small town girl, living in a lonely world, who took the midnight train going anywhere. It’s a song about a city boy, born and raised in South Detroit, who also took the midnight train going anywhere. It’s a song about streetlight people, living just to find emotion. It’s a song about humanity, the constant dream of success, people striving to find others who understand them.

It’s a mantra, imploring you, begging you, commanding you- don’t stop believing.

I’ll never escape from that song, whether it’s hummed softly from a couch in the Midwest, sang loudly into microphones, the lyrics splashed across a screen of generic Asians looking disaffected in a small room in New York, or shouted on the top floor of a double decker bus in London, there’s literally no song in my life that has punctuated the greatest of moments so thoroughly.

Even if SOME people don’t know the lyrics.

So, I’ll let music make the moment. I’ll keep my spastic dancing, thankyouverymuch, and you can just cover your eyes if you have a problem. I’ll let Bee and Ian and their special guests in the Blue Post force me to get up and move, and have the music take control.

Cause if there’s one thing that we can all understand, it’s music, and the need to believe.