We all know the scene: you pull your laptop from your bag for a lecture that you would kill to get out of, you open the lid, and there it is, that little red line on the battery icon. It hovers there and laughs at you. You specifically. A sigh of expletives and you go hunting for the charger you pray you left in your bag yesterday.
This situation arrived for me at the Campus Times budget meeting last Sunday, bringing with it a lasting disdain for American outlets. Tired from undisclosed side quests the night before and a morning of copyediting, I arrived at the CT office — for the second time in one day. I had my ailing laptop and was somewhat ready to claim a story for the week.
I had already encountered the situation of being laughed at by those two skinny little rectangular slots in American outlets: “Look at him, look at him! He can’t use us, the pins on his charger are too fat!” Not only did the phantasmic voice of the port fat-shame my plug, it also handily pointed out that it had one too many blades. British outlets have three; American type-A outlets have two.
Supposedly, America does everything bigger and better than the rest of the world. Except charging ports.
If I permanently leave my adapter attached to my laptop plug, issues are largely avoided. However, that was not the case on this fateful Sunday. In hauling out my excessively large plug/adapter combination from my overly packed rucksack, it became detached from the cable and I was left with a handful of canvas-covered wire, distinctly missing the bit I needed to stick in the wall. A crash out ensued, much to the amusement of the Opinions Editors, and the poor adapter absorbed much of my potentially-hangover-related anguish.
However, after getting over myself and accepting the loss of my remaining dignity, I started thinking about other practical and cultural differences I have encountered in this country that have caused amusing misunderstandings which presented almost as a language barrier of sorts.
A myriad of examples can be found in the words that my American friends and I have discovered that we don’t share. On the day of writing this, I came under heavy fire calling a “crosswalk” (and yes, the Americanism is going in the quote marks to indicate my doubt), a “zebra crossing.” I was then swiftly laughed out of the room for calling “crossing guards,” “lollipop ladies.” I explained the origins of these phrases, the striped pattern and lolly-shaped stick to indicate “go” and “stop” respectively. I am sure that these perfectly normal names will be held over my head until I return home at the end of the school year.
Things got a little more serious, and arguably more interesting, when one of my group here jokingly called the U.K. a socialist country. In 2024, we elected our first Labour government (our centre-left party) in fourteen years, after years under a right-wing government. However, referencing the British newspaper The Guardian, “differences between Labour and the Democrats remain profound.” Through further conversation we concluded, as many people older and wiser than us already knew, that America lacks what British people would call a left-wing party. According to the same article, it appears that both main political parties in this vastly diverse country actually sit on the right side of the global political spectrum.
According to Annalisa Merelli’s article in Quartz, the self-proclaimed “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders is revealed to actually be better classified as a social democrat. I know that this looks like I’m just being pedantic with word order, but they really are different things. What Sanders proposes is “a market-based capitalist economy, a developed welfare state and a liberal-democratic political system,” which by definition is globally centre-left. This, I think, says something about the American idea of socialism. If a prominent politician, part of what news station ABC calls “The Very Progressives,” of the American left wing is only considered “centre-left” by the rest of the world, then we can see that the U.S.’s political stage is distinctly skewed.
We know that American politics take on divisive and violent qualities through the actions of murderers that make headlines around the world. The assassinations of democratic Minnesota House of Representatives Speaker Melissa Hortman and “prominent right-wing political activist” Charlie Kirk both indicate a willingness to resort to extremism to achieve political goals. Whether that goal is to censor or, according to special Agent in Charge Alvin M. Winston Sr., conduct an attack on democratic values, victims on both sides of the American political spectrum suffer. Politics in this country appear to take on much higher (and deadlier) stakes than the rest of the Western world.
Even the way that American campaigns and elections operate has been a point of confusion. At home in the U.K., the time between the call for a general election and the vote is only six weeks. But in America, with primaries and campaigning, it can take two years to reach the inauguration of the newly elected world leader. Unlike the many American campaign advertisements I’ve been subjected to, British politicians cannot advertise on TV or radio outside of allotted slots for setting out election pledges. This is indicative of the capitalist undercurrent of the U.S. and its preference for a lack of regulation on a variety of issues.
It is evident that for the most part, America does things bigger than the U.K. bigger spending, bigger advertisements, and bigger campaigns. As for whether it’s better, I feel compelled to return to my Frankenstein’s monster of a charger. It’s oversized and bulky, but I can’t bring myself to call it better, despite it being bigger.
