Is it Rubber, or Is It an Eraser?

Picture this: a young girl in a crisp linen shirt, hair freshly blown out, standing in a stationery aisle with the quiet confidence of someone who has never once been wrong about a word in her life.

That young girl was me. That confidence lasted exactly four more seconds.

I grew up on the Queen's English — real English, nuns-and-rulers English, the kind where you diagrammed sentences for sport and recited Wordsworth before breakfast. I knew my colour from my favourite. I could spell "necessary" without flinching. When I landed in America, I assumed English would be the one thing I didn't have to relearn. Everyone else was busy figuring out new streets, new supermarkets, new money. Not me. I had the language. I was set.

So there I stood, needing an eraser, and asked the clerk, sweetly, clearly, like a woman who has never made a mistake in her life, for a rubber.

His face did something biblical. Something involving fire and floods. I smiled, waiting for my eraser, blissfully unaware that I had just said something you cannot say to a stranger in a stationery aisle in America, or possibly anywhere. Nobody explained it to me on the spot. Everyone just backed away slowly, the way you do from something that might still be armed. I found out what I'd actually said an hour later, in the car, when hubby laughed so hard he nearly drove us into a hedge.

I thought I'd hit my personal ceiling of humiliation. I had not.

Weeks later: a department store, bright lights, a saleswoman with a clipboard and zero warning, chirping, "Would you like to try on the pants?" — loudly, publicly, like she was announcing a raffle winner. Where I'm from, pants are what stays hidden under everything else. I froze on the spot, scandalized, certain I'd wandered into some sort of sting operation. It took the entire ride home to understand she meant trousers. On a rack. In full view of Macy's.

After that, the collapse was total. Lifts were elevators. Boots were Tunks. Biscuits were Cookies, and real biscuits — the soft, buttery, gravy-soaking kind — simply didn't exist here, which felt like the cruelest betrayal of the entire ordeal. I walked around for months like a woman narrating her own subtitled film, translating myself one humiliating word at a time.

Here's the part that still makes me laugh hardest: I moved here thinking I had nothing left to learn. Turns out I had an entire vocabulary of embarrassment waiting for me, wrapped in a bow, addressed specifically to my ego.

I still say the wrong word and phrases many times. I just enjoy the chaos now, instead of dreading it.

Being Cheeky is so much fun, and loving it, being my own Dame Amore.