BT (British Telephone) - This is the British equivalent of Ma Bell before the anti-trust people splintered it into separate companies whose cutthroat, mudslinging, circle-of-friends offering, celebrity endorsed competition make the Cola Wars of the early 80s look like cafeteria food fights by comparison.

You can still find the good old Dr. Who red phone booths that will allow you to make a phone call and/or whisk you back and forth in time to have adventures on the BBC. But the majority of BT public phones are modern, glass and steel affairs with digital displays that keep track of how much of the money you plunked in still remains for your call.

Which brings me to another point: The pay phones will accept any kind of coin, including pounds. Unless you are calling Guam or the Moon, do not-I repeat, do NOT-feed it any pounds. The phones do not give change, even if you only call across the street and use up just 10 pence on the call. The phone will happily keep the rest of your pound (with the sincere thanks of British Telephone, I'm sure) and then sit there silently and smugly, cleaning the dirt from under its fiber optics and waiting for you to do something else stupid, such as kick the coin return repeatedly and yell at it to give your bloody pound back!

With its dry British wit, the phone will find this uproariously hilarious and will digitally share it mirth with its friend, the Tube turnstile (see "Underground"), trying to convince it to join in the fun by shredding your 7-day metro pass next time you pass it through the slot. Don't worry, though. The Tube turnstiles are insufferably stuffy and proper and take their jobs of guarding the Underground entrances and exits very seriously. They receive the same training as those rigidly famous Beefeater guards, and will not crack a smile no matter what you do in front of them. They think the BT pay phones are childish and prefer to keep company with the double decker buses and giant, black taxis.

Badge - Button (the "Kiss me I'm Irish" sort, not the kind you use to keep the two halves of your shirt from falling open in public).

Bent - Just a tad extralegal, like most of the actions of Congressmen.

Billion - a million million (not a thousand million).

Biro - Ballpoint pen; just another example of a brand-name-like Band-Aid, Kleenex, or Rollerblade-becoming affixed to a general category of goods. By the way, did you know that "Popsicle" is a brand name, too? I didn't.

Bomb - A theatrical success, hence the opposite of what it means in America.

Cellotape - Scotch tape; the clear, flat strip of adhesive with which you can stick two things what didn't already come together to one another or two halves of something that once was whole but now isn't (though not fault of your own, perhaps) back together. (NOTE: This does not work with people. See a doctor for further instructions.)

Chemist - A pharmacy/drugstore. Makes them sound just a bit more medieval, doesn't it? Like maybe they're performing alchemy in the back room (a science that is still alive, by the way. They have stopped trying to transmute lead into gold and are now working on two problems: 1) Baldness (the "Hair Club for Men" is just a front for a vast, international ring of modern-day alchemists); and 2) How to give Democratic politicians a set of basic, human morals, values, and scruples (they gave up years ago on the Republicans).

Cinema - Movie theater (a "theatre" is only used to refer to those places where live people run around in 18th-century costumes pretending to be foppish, Shakespearian characters and speaking melodramatically. No, not Parliament, you goof, playhouses).

Clingfilm - That super-thin sheet of plastic that comes on a cardbaord tube in an oblong box and is used to wrap up or cover open containers of food to help keep them fresh and which I have to call "plastic wrap" as if it were the supermarket brand because the trademark holders get mad if you call it "Saran Wrap," which is dumb since that's what the whole dang USA calls it anyway and they should just get over it, the way Band Aids did. Anyway, I love saying the name of this kitchen staple in British instead: "Clingfilm." It just has a nice ring to it, no?

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