At 19, I loudly told a boyfriend, in front of his friends, that I needed to run back to his room to take off my pants. This was back before England experienced regular heatwaves, and I was in the habit of wearing jeans under the sundresses I’d brought with me from America. It was also before I understood that here, “pants” means underpants. The Noughties teenagers I’d moved country to study among were gracious about it and, eventually, whole hours would go by without someone mentioning my unmentionables.
In Netflix's Too Much, a fish-out-of-water romcom series about an American anglophile in London, 30-year-old Jess is confused when her taxi pulls up to the Hoxton “estate” she’s rented online. She thought she had magically satisfied her Downton Abbey taste on a flatshare budget; instead she's stumbled into one of British English’s most befuddling lexical puzzles, ranking up there with the use of “quite” to mean “not very” and “that’s interesting” to mean “please, dear God, move on”. The series, from Girls creator (and UK-based expat) Lena Dunham and her British husband, Luis Felber, traffics in casual mix-ups that betray deeper ones.
