10 Everday American Words That Are Totally Inappropriate In Britain

3. Dope

The 1937 Disney classic Snow White included the dwarf Dopey, a play on the colloquial Americanism for someone who is stupid. It only takes 5 minutes of watching The Jeremy Kyle Show in the morning to realise that Dope in Britain has a great disparity in meaning from its American counterpart. Dope has become inexplicably bound to ideas of heroin use, and despite arguably creating similar attributes in its users, the language relating to drugs is far more insidious in the UK than it is in the United States. The ever-flowing cascade of American culture into Britain has meant that idiocy and the word dope have become bonded, but not to the same extent as it has in the United States. Will.I.Am has further tried to alter the definition of the word in his stint as a Voice UK coach by exclaiming that almost any mediocre musician is 'Dope.' He is not calling them stupid, neither is he accusing them of habitual or addictive drug behaviour; he is using it to congratulate them on good performances, transmogrifying the word to alter its meaning to one of joy. Dope remains tightly woven around deep, dark, domineering ideas of a drug-laden underworld in the United Kingdom whereas American comedy programs routinely use the term to humorously establish certain characters as the centre of the joke by making them the 'Dope.'