The other day, my boss said to me, “Can I borrow a biro?” Something in that sentence didn’t sound quite right to me.
“What?” I answered, thinking I’d simply misunderstood.
“Can you pass me that biro?”
My eyes franticly scanned over my desk for something – some obscure office supply that matched the word “biro”. Something he could see that I obviously couldn’t. The seconds ticked by. Stapler, pencil, notepad, paper clip, rubber band….biro?
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I sighed, finally conceding.
“Pen.”
“Pen?”
Reading the confusion on my face, he chuckled, “Oh, sorry. Biro is a very English word.”
I’ve lived in the UK for a few years now and I like to think I’ve got most of the vocabulary differences and other subtle language nuances figured out. I know my queues from my lines and my chips from my fries. I know to add a u to colour, to change my z’s (zed, not ‘zee’) to s’s in words like ‘organisation’ and ‘realise’ and to add an s to the end of math.
But just when I think I’ve got all these language differences figured out, my boss asks me for something as simple as a pen – in English – and my brain fails miserably. Americans and Brits really don’t speak the same language sometimes.
Blogger’s Note: I did a little digging to find out why ball point pens are often called biros in the UK. Turns out, the inventor of the ballpoint pen was a Hungarian man called László József Bíró. In the 1940s, Britain’s RAF placed the first ever bulk order for 30,000 biros, as they worked better at high altitudes than old-fashioned fountain pens.
Interestingly, the word “biro” is used colloquially in British English, but it’s actually a registered trademark and should technically be capitalised (or capitalized).
