I am one of the world’s more irritable people, so perhaps my complaints carry less weight than other people’s but I am going to go ahead and rant anyway. If you follow my Twitter account (@gabydoman – shameless plug) you’ll know a few things about me: I like talking about the gym and my dog and I get upset by words such as “om nom nom” (if you’re over the age of 10, I think it’s unacceptable to speak like this) and “just sayin”, which seems to be code for “I am a smug so and so”.

But the word that’s been irritating me the most lately is “expat”. I am, technically, an expat, seeing as I haven’t lived in the UK permanently for about six years. But, I would never call myself an expat. I prefer immigrant, as unglamorous as it sounds.

I suppose the thing I object to more than the word itself is the way it’s used. There are expat groups and magazines and nights out all so you can keep meeting other people who can’t quite deal with the fact they’re not still back home.

I read a really vomit-inducing article in a magazine I will slightly alter the name of; Expat Fool. In Expat Fool they had a jovial feature entitled “You know you’ve been living in Thailand too long when ...”

This has the potential to be funny, of course. But, rather than pointing out the fact that you become used to crying real tears at every meal due to the spiciness or the fact that it soon becomes quite normal to leave your handbrake off when you park so that other people can roll your car out the way when they want to manoeuvre around yours, it was full of the kind of cringe-inducing self-entitled garbage that makes me ashamed of some of my fellow immigrants.

Such as “You know you’ve been in Thailand too long when you speak in broken English, like ‘me like Thailand. Me happy here’. Nope; that’s a sign you’re an expat fool and it’s high time you learnt to speak the language of the country you live in.

Other expat fool behaviour cited included never cleaning your own flat and never chopping your own fruit. It’s not having a maid that I found detestable, it’s the fact that this is what their experience of Thailand is. An expat fool can’t be bothered to learn about the culture or language and, instead, they just love the fact they’re being paid far beyond the local norms and so get to live a very privileged lifestyle. I wonder if they’d see their behaviour differently if it was someone coming to their country and acting in the same way.

Hallmarks of the expat fool are that they can barely speak a word of the language, only mix with their other expat friends, frequent bars and restaurants that are so similar to the ones they have at home they may as well have never left and love their adopted country primarily because they have so much money there.

I feel as though people who need to constantly refer to themselves as expats put up a wall between themselves and the place they live in and the people who live there. It’s almost as if they’re visiting a zoo and, although the experience is very fun and novel to them, there’s no way they’d actually get IN the cage and act as the animals do.

There’s impermanency about the word which makes me uncomfortable. Even if you don’t plan on living there forever, surely you’ll get more out of the experience if you’re really living as though it’s your home, rather than acting like it’s one big holiday? If the most noticeable thing that’s changed about your life as an expat is that you no longer cut your own fruit, I’d suggest you definitely need to get out and experience a little more.