Transatlanguage
Trouble comes in trees.
I grew up by the Greensand Ridge, which marks the northern edge of the Weald. This forest is Andredswald, the great ancient woodland of southern England. It is much diminished nowadays, with roundabouts and airports, but the woods are still populated with chestnut, birch, beech, and above all the majestic oak. Hard oak wood. Quercus Robur.
These days I live in the Northeastern Woodlands of North America, former home of the Mahican. The ancient forests hereabouts were clear-cut before 1900, rolled down the river to make boats and matchsticks. Now the hills are forested again, younger, with hemlock and birch and hornbeam and beech, cherry and ash - and oaks with funny pointy leaves. The North American oak trees are a vast and diverse genera. Red oak. Live oak. White oak, Quercus Alba, which is the ancestral family of all the European oaks.
We call them oaks, all of them. Unlike so many other things, where the Brits and Yanks stand "divided by a common language".
You probably know the trouble we have with words.
A couple years ago we sat down in a Mexican restaurant in Dublin and asked for "chips and salsa" as a snack while we pondered the menu. A few minutes later, the server came by, embarrassed at our terminology, and asked for clarification: "did you mean fries or nachos?"
Of course there's "pants", which is American for "trousers" and English for "underwear". An English "vest" the Americans might call a "wifebeater", but the Americans say "vest" to mean "waistcoat". Or "pudding", which is American for "blancmange", and the English word for "dessert".
And now, after only living abroad for twenty years, I found a new one. "Sycamore".
The sycamore trees of my youth drop their whirlygig seed-pods in autumn, helicoptering in the wind. You could pick up a handful of samara and throw them to spin and spiral around. The thing that most distinguishes a sycamore is its pairs of winged seeds.
But the American sycamore doesn't have those. Instead it has blobby button-balls, and mottled flaking bark. A lovely tree indeed. Grudgingly can I accept that the leaves are _almost_ similar to the European sycamore? No, not really. They have nothing in common.
"Sycamore" in England (Acer pseudoplatanus) is a maple.
"Sycamore" in America (Platanus occidentalis) is a plane.
I'm so confused. A little pissed. (No, not "drunk", but "annoyed"). Who let this happen?