Avoiding Total Confusion and Possible Aggravated Assault

There's nothing new here that wasn't already included on other pages of this site, but I thought it might be useful to include a recap of the words that mean something completely different in British English than in American English. In the interests of space (and in the interests that I want to go to bed and finish up this thing), I am not going to be funny here in the slightest. Any humor you get out of the following list, therefore, is your own.

I also do this to, I hope, prove a point. I have tried my best to make this entertaining and to get a few laughs out of you. If I did my job well enough and you did indeed find it amusing, than the following can be said.

Perhaps you found one of the 'dictionary' entries you have just read in the previous sections absolutely hilarious, or at least mildly amusing and worth a moderate chuckle. You may find that same words and its meaning becomes totally flat and devoid of humor below where it is just a brief blip in a bland, lifeless list.

In this same way, traveling without a good sense of humor firmly in place in your mental luggage is as bad as, if not worse than, forgetting, say, clean underwear or your traveler's cheques. If you keep your sense of humor about you, then you will be able to look back on the fact that you forgot your underwear and cheques and laugh (well, maybe not so hard about the traveler's cheques).

Perhaps you'll even write down the experience of it, or just share it as a topic of conversation 8 months later with a few friends; one of those stories that starts out, "Oh, have I got a story for you! Listen to what happened to me in London when I finally decided to throw my three-day-old underwear away. Now you must understand that all of the clothing stores in England were closed for a week for this special British holiday to honor the Protestant patron saint of neckties..." You will laugh, your friends will laugh...in short, you will have truly enjoyed your trip.

On the other hand, if you were so hell-bent on enjoying your vacation at any cost that every little mishap, unforseen change of plans, or unavoidable misunderstanding was seen as a horrible headache and a dark blot on your precious vacation time (two weeks a year, if you're lucky), your trip will have been totally wasted and worthless — just a bunch of photographs of famous monuments and maybe a postcard or two.

It is the experiences of travel and the memories that those experiences leave in your mind that will stay with you for the rest of your life. Those photographs you save in a laminated album are not what your trip was all about. They are merely bookmarks, pictorial references that, when you look at them, trigger a response, a memory of that time and that place and what was going on that day.

"Look, Marge," you can say, with the wry grin of amused and strangely cherished memory on your face as you crack open a page of your photo album five years later.
"Here's me...
...standing in front of Buckingham Palace...
...with no underwear on."

That's all I have to say. Here's the list of terms. Have a safe, fun, and above all very interesting trip.

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