I'm going to confuse this even further by saying that to me "a date" is something social that you've planned in advance. If I make plans to go for a fancy dinner with my husband, that's a date; if I make plans to grab coffee with my boss at 3pm, that's a date. The romantic "dating" concept wasn't something I knew of…

a) I can't hate Smith for this because she made it clear she didn't want to ask it, and in a way publicly exposing the fact that people are forcing a woman to ask another woman these tiresome questions is quite helpful.

Exactly. We were taught that if it's a fact, you immediately back it up with a source; if there's no source given, then obviously it's your opinion.

That cracks me up, because one of the things that irritates me almost daily on the internet is people who feel the need to write "In my opinion," as though if they don't what they say might be mistaken for fact.

Table manners are the "opposite of manners"? I totally agree that many points of etiquette are largely irrelevant to normal life, but the rest (the pleases and thank yous, etc) is wonderful.

The thing I kept thinking while I was reading this was, "I wonder if this might be slightly less of a problem for English people". Americans have always told me it's an English thing to be polite yet terrifying.

Very true; they wouldn't have worked for me but I'm sure they work very well for other people.

Oh, I totally agree that no one should feel obligated to provide a full bar — and the guests aren't obligated to hide their raised eyebrows! I absolutely refused to have any of my underwear publicly removed from my body and thrown around, which apparently is the tradition where I got married: people teased me about it…

Oh yeah! I forgot about that one! I know quite a few tattooed gay British men; no blood-donating for them.

Why wouldn't there be watermelon emoticons? There are tons of food ones. (I know this because my sister, for some reason, is fond of texting me emoticon descriptions of her meals.)

Don't worry, I had no idea either. My first thought was definitely "That sounds DELICIOUS!"

I had *no* idea about watermelon and tap dancing; you learn something new everyday. I lived in America so I picked up on friend chicken being a stereotype, but I'm sure a million others went right over my foreign head, despite the shared language!

I felt like that; I was really stressing out about the cost of everything. BUT it was all fine. I wish I hadn't worried so much. At the time, I was freaking out about spending $5,000 on one day, but it was worth it, and ever since I've been hearing about how it's "impossible" to do it for less than £859,840,384,480.97…

I would've flipped if I'd invited people to a party and then charged them for drinks, but at the same time we had very little money to throw around; however, a full bar all night for 120 people turned out to be nowhere near as expensive as I'd thought it would be, so I got to be a good host and didn't need to bankrupt…

Do you think it's inflated by the odd million-dollar wedding, though? Mine was $5,000, and the majority of my friends haven't spent much more than that. Our social-circle average would be pushed up hugely by my one friend who married a rich bloke, though, because their wedding was insane.

Yes. I LOVE it. I have very pale skin and very dark hair, which is the worst possible combination for being hugely visible… but the best possible combination for laser hair removal! Magic!

I once had a random HICCUP OUT OF NOWHERE while shaving my legs. Oh, the blood.

Yeah, I think after my friend was born and his mum had the transfusion in 1980-ish, no one knew why she was unwell at first (then her husband abandoned her and their child and shipped them back home, and almost everyone was afraid to go near her). I would've assumed that nowadays all the blood gets screened, and you…

Yes! Now you mention it, I do feel a bit peaky…

They still don't want gay blood now, as far as I know, at least where I lived. (Or English blood, either, so that was me out, too.)