Friday, June 10, 2011

Home Again Safe and Sound

I'm home, and happy to be here, and all is well. I am thrilled that it's Friday and I don't have anything I have to, have to do right this second. So I'm catching up on a tsunami of emails.

Speaking of which, here's a line from a British colleague -- it's how he closed the email:

Now off to France on hols! Wahey!

Who says we speak the same language? I've noticed that Brits abbreviate things in ways I don't think we do. Like University becomes Uni, for example. Thus "hols" is holiday/holidays although we'd say "Now off to France for vacation" or "Now off to France for the weekend" or whatever.

I have no idea what Wahey means or how one pronounces it -- I think the US equivalent would be "Yahoo!"

I've noticed more and more people saying "vay-cay" (for vacation) which I find oddly annoying -- I think that started as a Britishism.

1 comment:

Barbara said...

Welcome home! Lately I observe myself saying (in email) "Woohoo!" Not sure where that comes from either, but it sounds like it might be cognate with "wahey"?