American Couple Reacts: Guessing & Learning British Slang w/Ricky Gervais! Special Guest: Rebecca! 

Yeah, we use very random words for thing. Just yesterday at a family party I "insulted" my cousin by calling him a sponge...last week he was a spoon, sometimes he's a spanner

Yeah I guess it just has a double meaning

I don't think it is a current Vernacular. But it did mean that. I hear 'trendy' reamerging for some reason, so perhaps this will, too.

We use it in the colonies for other things too.. pants when you get thrashed in sports, like you've had your pants pulled down and spanked. Pants is something sh!t/rubbish, maybe because of shitt!ng your pants🤷‍♂️, Dunno association maybe..

risky is right, but to throuh a spanner in the works, in the North of the UK pants does also mean trousers. the kay is in the tone and manner of how the word is said

I was about to say the same thing! 😂

This comment will only encourage her further uses of the words 😂🤣

@@TheNatashaDebbieShow If Rebecca liked those two words perhaps she will like Wang as its the same as toddler but also you can wang somethin out as in to throw it.

We have that word here Jon

@@Pandora882 “There’s my toddler…”

@@Chumber3403 Sorry autocorrect put toddler instead of toddger what a wan@$%er

Why us it though that when we say it to each other we know exactly what we mean? Is it we're just used to it?

also the generation

@@thatsthat2612 yeh lol its like we don't even hear the word in our head we just say it.

Who/what was she wanking and tossing over? 😁

Oh we so did love this ! You continue to entertain me, whilst in my robe (dressing-gown here in the UK) I am sitting on my fanny (in both respects of the word, both sides of the pond 🤣) Your show is not pants, the complete opposite.. Another version of Waz is a wazak... an idiot.. but men usually waz (pee), women go to the bog (toilet).. Love you ladies, you really make me laugh and smile ☺️☺️☺️

Also, just remembered you asking us for some slang terms for female anatomy.. You obviously have learnt we use the word fanny... but also vag, fadge, minge, mingita, flower, front-bottom and lady garden are some of the ones I have heard in the past ! Lol I know men have far more many names for their penis.. including John, George, Paul, Richard, Boregard, Horatio and Bernard. 🤨😆

@Catherine Sherratt Interestingly, I found an explanation for John Thomas, which is a hyper-generic name for an English gentlemen. And it's said, I classy John Thomas, will always stand to attention, when a lady enters the room.🤭🤦‍♂️🤣😊

@@andy2950 oh my lord that is hilarious !! 🤣🤣🤣 🤭🤭🤭 Another British term is "how's your father?" 😉🤭 hehehe

@@andy2950 ps... Andy, you look super cute from your profile pic 😄 😉😁

There are a few places in the country where they use "pants" in the same sense the Americans do (e.g. another word for trousers)--knew a chap from Wigan who always used it that way.

@@d2factotum I think they do in parts of Manchester too.

Hold on, I'm off to the bog

@@d2factotum can confirm, I’m in the Northwest (from the Wigan Borough) and we say pants instead of trousers. We also use pants to mean rubbish too :)

@@faithpearlgenied-a5517 Yes we do in North Manchester 👍

This is EXACTLY Debbie in real life, ALL THE TIME! 😂😂

I can picture it now. "He called me a jobby jabber 20 years ago. THAT'S WHAT HE MEANT" 🤬 😂😂😂

Catch him off-guard by calling him a "wee toley" (pronounced toe-lay) - it's another Scottish term for a brown trout, a turd, a baby otter (with a shiny coat), a bog-bar, a lawn cigar, dog eggs etc. I'm sure he'll appreciate it :)

Get him to introduce “Bell end”.

@@bobwhite894 Surely Billy Connolly.

Haha aye, a wee jobby

You should only be rude to people you like. Definitely not if you haven’t been formally introduced 😉

"Ideal Standard" was the UK offshoot of American Standard and made sanitary wear after the war. I've always thought that to the British way of thinking "Ideal" and "Standard" were a stupid (at best an oxymoron) pair of words to stamp on such a utilitarian product, hence bog standard as a slightly derogatory term.

Very late to the party, but I just wanted to say that the Thomas Crapper/crap thing is a myth. The word "crap" was used in that sense before the company came to be. It's a fun coincidence, though. Or maybe he thought that since he already had the name he could just as well go into that business.

It is a comedic word to use for something rubbish but it is also fairly acceptable in polite company. I would use it near someones granny rather than saying something stronger

I do that too (and I'm not bothered about not swearing). I once accidently got in the habit of saying "rats" every time something went wrong - no idea why.

It’s a decent substitute for the s word

If I'm going to the bathroom I'm usually going for a bath. I don't know why Americans need to bathe so much. 😉

In certain areas (eg Merseyside) they used to use the term "outdoors" instead of "offy"..."Where ya goin?" "Heading down the outdoors"...Don't know if it's still current, but it certainly was some 45 years ago when I visited for a few weeks...culturally perhaps the opposite of "going down the Phil" (jeez I never saw bogs like the gents there).

@@cogidubnus1953 in the midlands as well, we always said 'outdoor' for the off licence

Actually, Grimsby is from the Norseman( Viking when they were raiding) called Grim, Grims village. English is a foreign tongue forced upon the Britons by the Angles, Jutes and Saxons. The Saxons thought that the Angles language sounded nicer than Saxon, so all the fashionable Saxons could read and write in the Angles language. They took control of "England." Except for those from the Celtic, Brythontic people who moved west and became the "Wealesh" Saxon for strangers, Welsh. I believe. The Saxons didn't interfere with those in the "Strangers land" There are hints of the Celtic language that spread the length and breadth of great Britain at one time. With words like Aberdare, Aberfan in Wales, Aberdeen in Scotland which means on the river. I must say I'm no Historical linguist or anything I've read books like the Adventure of English by Melvin Bragg a North Eastern lad himself. Lamb and mutton at one time meant the same thing Lamb is Saxon/ English. Mutton, Norman. But now Lamb is a young sheep and mutton a bit on the tough side. I love the English language it never sits still there's always a new swear word or just ordinary word coming your way.

@@andrewmstancombe1401 .. Well, the tale of Grim and Havelock, with the main characters depicted on Grimsby's town seal in the early 13th Century, is a medieval legend or myth involving fictional Danish kings and a character by the name Grim, a name that originate from Scandinavia and can also be fund in the Icelandic Njáls saga ("The Story of Burnt Njáll") about a blood feud instigated by the wife of Gunnar, one of the main characters, and where we read about the sons of Njál (Grim and Helge). Njáls saga is btw. considered to be both the longest and most famous of the Icelandic sagas.

Fascinating. Thanks so much. Amazing how the 'melting pot' of language shows us so much of who and where we came from. Through so many years.😊

@AGF fans understand I am not arguing with you. I'm discussing this with you. No offence intended. I don't think we're a million miles apart on saying the same thing. What I was trying to say was the By ending did not mean city. I'm not certain but I don't think even London was a "city" in the 9th century. I found this on the net, no not from the dreaded Wikipedia. Sometime in the 9th century CE, Grimsby was settled by Danes. Legend has it that the name Grimsby derives from Grim, a Danish fisherman. The suffix -by is derived from the Old Norse word býr for village (compare with Swedish: by). When it comes to old places we only have legend most of the time or what explanation for Tydd Gote in South Lincolnshire Mavis Enderby Bag Enderby all in Lincolnshire. Bunny in Nottinghamshire. As well as the fact it seems the English have always had a sense of humour even in the 13th c people named their children with funny names such as Teresa Green Some of the middle ages names have you in fits of laughter I'm almost certain off the top of my head someone named their child Ding or Ding Dong Bell. So Grims By could just have been someone taking the P and it stuck. Lol.

​@@andrewmstancombe1401 .. It could have been kind of a joke, like the Vikings naming Greenland ( Grœnland, grœnn = “green”), though the guess is that they named it so, to lure in more Viking settlers, who obviously did not know how cold it was and what it looked like. Naming Grim's By could have been kind of Viking humor, but as written, then Grim was not an unusual name for a boy or man, so it could have been the name of an actual person and 'by' is actually derived from bygd (bygð) which means to build or a built-up area, so By (or Býr) was not only a city as we now think of it, but could also be a larger trading settlement, or of the more modest size of a small town or village. But Hedeby (Heiðabýr) became the largest and most important Danish and Scandinavian trading settlement during the Viking age, described around year 965 by the foreign traveler, merchant and chronicler Abraham ben Jacob as, "a very large city at the very end of the world's ocean." Considering that Abraham ben Jacob travelled far in Western and Central Europe and to Rome, where he was received with an audience with the Holy Roman Emperor, then Hedeby must have been rather large and pretty impressive for him to think of it as a very large city, in compare with what he had experienced elsewhere.

Men have a waz - women wet their lips 😆😆😆

@@helenagreenwood2305 oh lord you are going to love this one then.. I grew up around Australians.. when a woman came back from the toilets, someone might say "did you get your hair wet?" She would probably look confused and say "no?" Our True Blue Aussie lady friend of ours would say "? Did you piss through a straw??" 🤣🤣🤣🤣

@@catshez 😆😆😆😆

We did a video on Cockney Rhyming slang! 2 in fact 👌

@@TheNatashaDebbieShow I'll check them out tomorrow, getting late here in Western Australia and I got work tomorrow. Take care xoxoxo

@@mattblackwell4100 Are you British matt or Australian, mate?

@@Isleofskye I was born in England (lived and worked in London & Essex most of the time) and moved to Perth, Western Australia about 20 years ago. Best thing I ever did with my life!

Thanks for your reply matt.My geography is good (My record is naming the 50 USA States, out aloud, in alphabetical order in 22 seconds (twice lol ) but at 67 years old, I never realized until 10 years ago that Perth has 2,000 miles of desert to all the other major Oz States. I worked for 20 years in Romford at The Stadium there until 2017 and did you move because of the attraction of the weather and outdoor lifestyle this afforded or the fact England and London were changing mate ? Are there many Brits in Perth, please? Good Luck matt..

Shake hands with the unemployed, point Percy at the porcelain.

Also where I'm from I have heard quite a few variations:" I'm just taking the dog for a walk, " or "just going to shake hands with the boss, " or "going for a slash," I have heard of waz and wiz. For women: " just popping to the throne room " or " just off to the ladies " " just off to the loo" or " just off to the powder room." I think it depends on the company you are with and where you are as to what you may say. For many( especially women I think) if you are in a fancy restaurant for example, you want to be polite to everyone you are with by excusing yourself from the table, hence they probably ( well the most I think) wouldn't want others to know you were busting and about to turn one out, just as they were about to tuck in, so to save embarrassment they would have a more polite terminology.

An excellent new word to mean "confusing somebody with nonsense" especially when performing a scam. Thanks Debs.

So glad you enjoyed it!! ❤❤

Vids

Don't know about that last bit...growing up in my day pubs often had two or three bars (Saloon, Snug or Ladies, and Public Bar in descending order of class) plus a "hole in the wall" off licence in a lobby directly off the street...I'd say the offy was slightly more common than the snug, in the south of England anyway...prices differed too with the higher rates being charged in the Saloon Bar...

Up north we say Beer off.

@@cogidubnus1953 There's no on licence, it's just a licence. Off licences are because the premises don't have the facilities, or are in an unsuitable area to allow drinking without causing annoyance to the local residents.

@@ethelmini I never said there was such a thing as an "on licence" - merely that back in the day many pubs had what was effectively an off-licence attached. Your reasoning behind the very reasons for an off-licence are incomplete. For example, many folk, especially single women felt they couldn't enter licenced premises unaccompanied out of shame. Also some demands for more genteel drinks would not be satisfied in a pub. These demands were in some cases catered for by a separate offy (of the type you mention), sometimes a "hole in the wall" offy attached to a pub, or even sometimes a separate shop attached to a pub...an example of the former once existed in a hallway off the Cleveland in Brighton, latter used to exist at the Stanmer Park Hotel in Brighton where I purchased my own very first illegal bottle of Guinness in 1968...there was a standalone offy in Grantham Road at the time. There you go...an example of each in an area of less than half a square mile...not bad for something that didn't exist.

Offy would be the slang term for an off-licence.

squit is used by people all over the UK however in most parts it is slang for diarrhea

@@theaces3697 "The squits" is used as a slang term for diarrhea. I have never heard "squit" to mean something is untrue except in East Anglia, especially Norfolk.

Yeah Rebecca was fun!

Sorry, I spelt Rebecca’s name wrong.

Love Ricky!! A true anti-hero!!

I know I'm several months late but hey. No one seems to have told you that the W is really quiet rude and wouldn't be said in general conversatio