“Two nations, divided by a common language”
I always thought that was Churchill, but having checked, both Wilde and Shaw offered close approximations earlier.
Anyway, on Friday evening I had my first “oh my god, San Francisco public transport can occasionally be as bad as the London version” moment when the Muni train stopped at a platform for ages with no explanation why. Eventually there was an announcement which was that the delay was caused by “a problem with a disabled car between Civic Center and Van Ness stations”.
My British language centre initially translated this as “a problem with a car for disabled people” before I mentally righted the thing to be “a problem with a train which has been disabled”.
Which got me to thinking (and believe me, there’s going to be more of this over the coming months - I did a Linguistics degree don’t forget) about the linguistic twist that makes the US fall more readily into use of the word ‘handicapped’, which in the UK is regarded as very un-PC*. Generally America takes the more sensitive line on such things, so it’s an odd stand-out/hold-out. This is the country, after all, where it’s not uncommon to see menus and restaurant signs refer to ‘wait staff’ or ‘waitpersons’ rather than make use of a gender specific term…
* The thinking is thus: That just because a person has a disability it doesn’t automatically follow that they’re handicapped by it.