I've just finished reading this entire thread, and, as an American, here's what I've learned:
- BritGAF has some bizarre misconceptions of what it is commonplace in America
- The Brits are annoyed/amused by how we pronounce things, but really its only our tendency us
reading things the way they are fucking spelled, i.e. "Worcestershire" as "wooster-sher" instead of "worst-eh-shire". The letter "e" at the end means the "i" has a long sound. You can't make exceptions to your own language rules on account of your funny accents.
Boiling water in microwaves is for lazy college students, and I don't know of anyone who does it. We use kettles where I'm from. Not electric kettles mind you, I have never even seen one of those before and I had no idea they existed before this thread.
Microwaving water IS faster or just as fast as your electric kettles, however, for practical everyday things like getting the water hot enough for tea or for a cup of instant ramen noodles. For noodles my microwave can get the water hot enough between 1 and 1 1/2 minutes. For instant coffee or tea it takes even less time. And it makes all the sense in the world because heating water is the one and only thing microwaves are good at!
If I needed actual boiling, bubbling water (as opposed to really hot water) I and pretty much everyone else in the United States would heat it up on a stove.
Except for the hard and unsweetened part. Our biscuits are flaky--sometimes crumbly-- layered, and in the case of buttermilk biscuits, certainly sweetened.
Pictured: A standard soft, pillowy biscuit.
BritGAF should subtract points from itself every time they're way off the mark like this.
We don't "say" aluminium weird, we just have a different way of spelling it altogether because of the somewhat complicated history of the word:
http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/aluminium.htm
We say monastery that way because that's how its spelled. Funny thing that, pronouncing words the way they're spelled. Please tell me, from where does the "tree" come from in monastery?
American jam and jelly are two different, but similar things.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jam#Jelly
From BritGAF's bizarre misconceptions of American culture (That stupid bit in the OP about movie theaters--I can only recall two movies off the top of my head that I've seen in my entire life where the theater audience clapped, much less cheered) to the hypocritical finger pointing at how the US pronounces words, to their insane denial of the absolute shittiness of PAL compared to NTSC, this round goes to the US easily.