Showing posts with label furniture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label furniture. Show all posts

British words (most) Americans don't know

This is part 2 of an examination of the words that were very country-specific in Brysbaert et al. (2019)'s study of vocabulary prevalence. For more detail on the study, please see part 1, on American words Britons don't tend to know. This half-table shows the words that British survey respondents tended to know and American ones didn't:

All of the terms will be discussed below, but not necessarily in the order given in the table. Instead, I'll group similar cases together. The unknown items from AmE were overrun with food words—that's less true here, though there are some.

Stationery items

The first two items are generici{s/z}ed brand names for office supplies. Tippex is correction fluid, known in AmE by brand names Wite-Out and Liquid Paper. Tippex is used as both noun (for the fluid) and as a verb for the action of covering things over—literally with correction fluid or figuratively. Here are a few examples from the GloWBE corpus that show some range:

  • Her contact details had been TippExed over a number of times. 
  • make-up, hair extensions, fake tan and tippexed teeth
  • But one series of game Tippexed over the old rules   

Biro is an old trade name for a ball-point pen, based on the name of the inventor László Bíró. The first syllable is pronounced like "buy" (not "bee").

Amusements

Pic from here
A tombola is a kind of raffle, where numbers are pulled out of a revolving drum-type container, and also a name for that container. The game is often found at school fairs, (BrE) village fetes, etc. The OED tells us tombola comes to English "partly from French, partly from Italian", which might mean the French got the game from Italy. The Italian game seems more like bingo. While bingo is called bingo in BrE, you might use a tombola (the drum-thing) for playing it, so it's not surprising that tombola was adopted as the name of a UK-based online bingo company.

Dodgems (or dodg'ems) are (orig. AmE) bumper cars. The BrE has the look of a brand name turned to a generic, though it's unclear to me if that name was ever trademarked. The cars were first called dodgems by their inventors, the Stoeher brothers of Massachusetts. This isn't the first time we've seen an American product name become the generic name for the product type in BrE—but I'll let you sort through the trade names posts for others.

Abseil might not quite belong in the amusement category, as it seems more like hard work, but let's put it here. It's a verb from German for a means of descending a mountain (etc.) using a rope affixed on a higher point. Americans use the French word for the same thing: rappel. The idea comes from the Alps, where both German and French are to be found, so it looks like Americans and Brits might go to different areas of the mountain range. (This is a counterexample to my usual claim that the English will take any opportunity to use a French word.)

Food

Chipolata is a kind of small sausage. They've been mentioned already at the pigs in blankets post. The name comes from French, which got it from the Italian name for an onion dish.

Plaice is a kind of flatfish that's common at British fish-and-chip shops. The OED says "European flatfish of shallow seas, Pleuronectes platessa (family Pleuronectidae)", but some other fish (esp. outside the UK) are sometimes called plaice. The name came from French long ago. It shows up in *many* punny shop names. 

Korma is a type of very mild curry typically made with a yog(h)urt-based sauce. BrE speakers generally have large vocabularies of the types of curry that are popular at UK Indian take-aways and restaurants, which often have menus with headings based on the curry type, like this at the right. It (orig. BrE) flummoxed me at first when English friends invited me over for a take-away and I was expected to already know this vocabulary and be able tell them what I'd like without reading the fine-print descriptions of the curry ingredients. The OED tells us korma comes from an Urdu word for 'cooked meat', which itself derives from a Turkish word.

Escalope takes us back to French, and the French influence on UK menus. OED defines it as "Thin slices of boneless meat (occasionally of fish), prepared in various ways; esp. a special cut of veal taken from the leg." It's found in menu phrases like veal escalope or an escalope of chicken.
P.S. Thanks to Cathy in the comments we have an AmE equivalent for this, the Italian scallopini. Another case (like courgette/zucchini) of a French-derived food word in BrE and an Italian one in AmE. (The Prodigal Tongue covers this a bit more.)

 

Slang

Yob is an example of back slang. It's the word boy backwards, and it's used particularly for young men/boys who engage in anti-social behavio(u)r. Hooligans, etc.

Naff is a word that's hard to translate exactly, which is why it has been one of my 'untranslatables' in the past. It's an adjective that refers to a certain kind of 'uncool', or as Jonathon Green defines it: "in poor taste, unappealing, unfashionable, bad" and more recently it's also meant "second-rate, workaday".  I've seen Americans get this word very wrong, so best not to attempt it until you've been in the UK for a some time. Some Brits will tell you it stands for 'not available for f***ing', but, as with almost all such acronymic slang tales, that is almost certainly false. Green's Dictionary of Slang gives this for etymology:

[? north. dial. naffhead, naffin, naffy, a simpleton; a blockhead; an idiot or niffy-naffy, inconsequential, stupid or Scot. nyaff, a term of contempt for any unpleasant or objectionable person; however note Polari etymologist WS Wilcox in a letter 25/11/99: ‘I have long believed that naff may well derive from Romany naflo, a form of nasvalo – no good, broken, useless. Since several other Parlary words derive from Romany this is not impossible’; in this context note also 16C Ital. gnaffa, a despicable person]

Brolly isn't in the same slang league as the previous examples. It's a kind of (orig. AmE) cutesie way of referring to an umbrella. As I discuss in some detail in The Prodigal Tongue, this is what BrE speakers say instead of (AmE) bumbershoot, an Americanism that Americans often erroneously believe to be British. That bit of my book is excerpted at Humanities magazine. Have a read and if you like it, maybe buy or borrow the book? (Please?)

Bolshy is an adjective derived from bolshevik, and as such it originally meant 'left-wing, Communist', but these days it's more often used to mean 'uncooperative, obstructive, subversive' (thanks again Mr Green) or 'Left-wing; uncooperative, recalcitrant' (OED). Don't get bolshy in the comments, OK? 

The rest

The other items on the list are just too miscellaneous to fit together under meaningful subheadings.

Gazump (and its sister gazunder) have been treated in an Untranslatables post already, so you can read about it there. It's about underhanded (BrE) property/(AmE) real-estate -buying behavio(u)r.

Kerbside is just (AmE) curbside in BrE spelling. Here's the old post about curb/kerb

Judder is an onomatopoetic verb. Like shudder, but used more often of mechanical things, like engines that aren't working well. Here's an example from the GloWBE corpus: "the bus juddered over potholes".  The OED's first citations of it are in the 1930s, so it came into English long after AmE & BrE separated.

Chiropody is used as AmE (and more and more BrE) would use podiatry, though some specialists try to force a difference in meaning between the two (see this, for example). You'll find other sites telling you there is no difference, and that, for the most part is true. The word podiatry was coined in the US and there covered the same things that chiropody covered in the UK. Chiropody comes from the Greek for 'hands' and 'feet', and you can see the similarity with chiropractor, who uses their hands to treat people. What's a bit funny about chiropody/chiropodist is that the pronunciation is all over the place. Some use the /k/ sound for the ch, following the Greek etymology. That's how dictionaries tend to show it. Others use a 'sh' sound as if it comes from French. You can hear both on YouGlish.

Quango stands for 'quasi-autonomous non-governmental organi{s/z}ation'. I remember learning about non-governmental organi{s/z}ations, or NGOs, when I lived in South Africa in the 90s. Apparently NGO has taken off as a term in the US in the meantime (see comments), but not quango. A quango is an NGO that gets public funds to do something that the government wants and maybe has government participants. Google says the word quango is 'derogatory', but I think that depends a bit on your political persuasion. Here's a BBC fact sheet on quangos.

A pelmet is a decorative window-covering that doesn't cover a window—it covers the top of the window and maybe the curtain rail. It can be a little curtain or a kind of box or board. Here's a selection of those that come up on a Google Image search:


The curtainy type of pelmet would be called a valance in AmE—which we've seen before because it has a bed-related use in BrE. I honestly do not know what the boxy things would be called in AmE. I've never had one in an AmE house, and my efforts to find them on US websites have not (orig. AmE) panned out. If you have the answer, say so in the comments and I'll update this bit.

P.S. Thank you commenters! Grapeson offers cornice as an AmE possibility. Usually (and in BrE too) this is a thing at the joint of the wall and the ceiling (often decorative). But Wikipedia has a little section on 'Cornice as window treatment' that confirms this usage. Then Diane Benjamin offers box valance as an AmE alternative. The Shade Store says this:

The primary difference between a curtain valance and a cornice is that valances are made out of drapery or fabric, while cornices are typically made out of wood.

Thanks to the commenters for helping out!


Finally, chaffinch is a bird species (which didn't come up in the recent bird posts). The Wikipedia map to the right makes it easy to see why Americans didn't recogni{s/z}e the word (the green areas are where chaffinches typically live). Wikipedia does say "It occasionally strays to eastern North America, although some sightings may be escapees."



So, that's that! Words that most British folk know and most Americans don't. If only I'd had Brysbaert et al.'s list when I was trying to make very difficult AmE/BrE quizzes.


Read more

bed skirts, dust ruffles, valances

I've now remembered what I meant to cover and forgot in my last post. That post is already too, too long, so here's another post about bedding.

Years ago, my former colleague Max sent a list of presumably AmE terms that were new to him when he read Jane Smiley's Ten days in the hills. It included the following [emphasis added in the Smiley quotation]:

"She leaned over the side of the bed and reached under the bedskirt. She pulled out a large-ish box wrapped in blue paper."

= BrE "valance"?
My response at the time was that I wouldn't have called it a bedskirt--I'd have called it a (AmE) dust ruffle, which for me was a new fancy thing that I came with my first (AmE) comforter set (see last post). Nowadays, I think I would say bed skirt (though I would make it two words) when referring to one that hangs down straight (maybe with a neat pleat or two), as one finds in hotels. The pink gingham one that I had in my youth had more of a 'ruffle' to it.  But US retailers call them both bed skirts, it seems. The Pioneer Linens site is indecisive about whether to put a space in bedskirt and treats bed skirt and dust ruffle as synonyms:
A bed skirt or dust ruffle slides in between your mattress and box spring, making your bed appear more together and complete.
The Corpus of Contemporary American English indicates that bed()skirt and dust ruffle are equally common, with 30 dust ruffle, 26 bed skirt, and 4 bedskirt.

 Max's suggestion of valance in BrE surprised me, as I only knew this as something that covers a curtain rail. (It has other meanings too, covering altars and such.) Clearly, it's not something I've ever shopped for in the UK. The OED gives us this definition:
2 spec. a. A border of drapery hanging round the canopy of a bed; in later use, a short curtain around the frame of a bedstead, etc., serving to screen the space underneath.
It's hard to tell from the quotes when the 'later use' begins, but at the latest it's mid-19th century.  One can get around the ambiguity of valance by label(l)ing them valance bed sheets, as amazon.co.uk does, but in the British National Corpus all the instances of bed-related valances are just called valance--the rest of the context serves to let you know which kind.

Two blog posts within 24 hours? Don't get used to it!
Read more

bed linen(s): duvets and comforters

If you want to know how to buy bed sheets in the US or UK, then the last post (on bed sizes) is the best place to start, since the sizes of beds affect the sizes of sheets and related things. But now let's talk about what we call the bed linen or bedclothes or bedding-- starting with those collective terms.

All those terms can be found in both BrE and AmE. Whether you spell bed linen and bedclothes as one word or two, with or without a hyphen, varies, but it's not a US/UK issue. Two-word bed linen and one-word bedclothes are the most common forms of their respective lexical items in both dialects. Bedding and bedclothes have other meanings, of course, but comparing the relative numbers of the terms is helpful for considering whether there are differences in their commonality in the US and UK. Here's what the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the British National Corpus (BNC) have to say about how often these words occur per 100 million words of text and speech. (The bed linen and bedclothes numbers include spellings with and without spaces and hyphens.)

per 100m words AmE BrE
bedding 324 394
bed()clothes  57 149
bed()linen* 41 107


BNC is older than COCA, so I checked these numbers against the comparable 1990s data in the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), and it looked about the same. So: the terms are ranked the same in both dialects, with bedding most common and bed()linen least common--but there's less use of these terms in general in the American corpus (which either means that there's less talk of these things in the sources that the American corpus has used or that Americans are more apt to say more specific words like sheets or covers when they can. The time that would be required to determine which of those possibilities (if either) is right would require me to pay myself a (probably orig. AmE) helluva lot of overtime for this blog, and I can't afford that much nothing.

But there is a twist in the tale that that table tells, and it's to be found in the asterisk.  In the 'bed sizes' post, I wrote bed linens (plural) and commenter Picky asked about whether this plural was American. I hadn't noticed this before, but yes, it is. COCA has nearly five times as many bed linens as bed linen, whereas BNC has less than a handful of plural ones. 

per 100m words AmE BrE
bed()linen 7 105
bed()linens 34 2


These terms can include pillow cases as well as the bigger pieces, but I'm already spending too much time and space on this, so I'm deciding right now to promise everything to do with pillows in another post, just to make sure that I go to bed again before my (BrE) holiday/(AmE) vacation ends.* I'm going to focus here on the most transatlantically confusing bed coverings: the duvet and the comforter.

The original 'bed size' post was written because of a question that Purple Claire had asked on Twitter, but before that question, she had asked another: "What's duvet cover in American English? I think they think duvet cover is the whole thing, incl the eiderdown..." Let me tell you my personal experience of duvets, as an American who grew up in a very cold part of America in the 1960s-80s.

When I was little, we had (orig. AmE) bedspreads. These were not filled, but were often (at that time/in my realm of experience) chenille or candlewick. People with more crafty families than mine might have homemade quilts, which have padding, but not fluffy filling.

Then, when I was 10 or so, comforters became popular in my world. We bought them at Sears and mine had a pink gingham pattern on it. It was filled with some sort of polyester filling and could be put into a washing machine. But we wouldn't put it into the machine anymore often than we put our bedspreads in (i.e. not very often) because they were always separated from our skin by a flat sheet.  The OED defines this US sense of comforter as 'a quilted coverlet'. The things I would call comforter are quilted to keep the filling from dropping to one end, but they not what I would call quilts, or even coverlets, since I'd not apply those words to anything so thick and squishy. (But it's perfectly possible--though hard to tell from OED quotations--that comforter has been applied to less squishy things in the past...or present even.) The Wikipedia entry for comforter calls it 'a type of blanket', but that is similarly odd to me. Blankets, in my world, don't have filling.

I don't think I came across duvets until I was in my 20s and travel(l)ing away from my home country. I've seen comforter translated as 'American for duvet', but that's not quite right.  A duvet is made to be covered by something else--they are like pillows in that way.  (Duvets are also traditionally filled with down, but that's not always the case now. I think I had come across the term eiderdown for such a thing while I still lived in the US--but just the term, in the context of reading about something European. I'd not experienced the thing.)  When I first slept in hotels that used duvets in the way they are intended,  I was put off by not having a top sheet. I didn't fully understand that the cover on the duvet would have been changed for each guest. It took me quite a while to get used to the feeling of sleeping with a duvet and without a top sheet, as one doesn't get the same sense of being 'tucked in'. It's what I like now, though. While I think it's probably easier for one's partner to steal the covers when using a duvet and no top sheet, one doesn't get one's feet tangled up in the tucked-but-tugged sheet when that happens.

So, returning to PurpleClaire's search for duvet covers in the US, one of the places she looked was Target.com, and it does look to me there like what they're calling a duvet cover set does involve a cover for a duvet. (At first I thought--and this may be true elsewhere--that she was finding people who used duvet cover pleonastically--a duvet for covering your bed, rather than a cover for your duvet). What is weird on the Target site, from a UK perspective, is that the 'duvet cover set' includes the duvet. In Europe/the UK, you'd not get the duvet with the set, as (a) you might want to change your colo(u)r scheme before you need a new duvet and (b) you might have more than one duvet for different times of the year.

(Somebody's intending to comment that duvets are called doonas in Australian English. There might not be as much joy in doing so now that I've said it.)

Which brings us to tog. Nowhere in the Target description do we find this word. But check out the (UK) Marks & Spencer categories for duvets:

Duvets in categories: '4.5 tog & below, 7.5 tog to 10.5 tog, 13.5 tog and above, All seasons'

To give the Collins Dictionary definition:
a.  a unit of thermal resistance used to measure the power of insulation of a fabric, garment, quilt, etc. The tog-value of an article is equal to ten times the temperature difference between its two faces, in degrees Celsius, when the flow of heat across it is equal to one watt per m2

While I knew that we don't see this word in AmE, I was surprised not to find it in the online versions of the American Heritage or Merriam-Webster dictionaries (other, unrelated tog entries were there)--as I would have thought that maybe skiers or someone would have needed it. The OED says that this sense of tog (derived, they seem to suggest, from the 'clothing' sense of tog) is 'modelled on the earlier U.S. term clo'.  Merriam-Webster says only that clo is an abbreviation of clothing--I can't find it in other dictionaries, but Wikipedia says that the "standard amount of insulation required to keep a resting person warm in a windless room at 70 °F (21.1 °C) is equal to one clo." At any rate, no one seems to be using it to sell duvets or comforters.

I have a feeling there's something else I meant to mention here and forgot about.** But this is long enough, don't you think? I reserve the right to add whatever I forgot tomorrow morning, after I've spent the night talking to my bed linen(s) again. Pillows must wait for another post--not necessarily the next one.  I might wait for insomnia to start leaving me alone, so that the topic will not seem so cruel.

Before I go, some Other Business:
  • For the Olympic season, I wrote a little piece for Emphasis Writing's e-bulletin on '10 Differences between US and UK English'. (Many of the topics I discuss there can be found elsewhere, in more detail, on this blog too.)
  • I'm speaking at BrightonSEO Conference on 14 September. That's SEO, as in Search Engine Optimization, which I know approximately nothing about, but they seem like a fun bunch to subject to my rants. I'm afraid it's fully booked, but if you have any funny US/UK search engine tales you want to share with me, feel free to email me--I love new material!
  • I'm also taking my How Americans Saved the English Language talk to a new audience on 9 October: Brighton Skeptics [sic!] in the Pub. If you're in the area and haven't already heard all those jokes, then do join us at the Caroline of Brunswick, 8pm.




* I failed. This is being posted 10 days after I returned to the UK.
** (Postscript) The things I forgot and many more are discussed in the comments--some good ones there, have/take a look.



Read more

bed sizes

British correspondent PurpleClaire was having trouble buying bedding on-line to be used in the US, so she tweeted "what on earth is a full-size bed?" I gave her a tweet-sized answer...but here is a fuller version of the story--with lots of help from Wikipedia.

The short version: the basic sizes for American beds are twin, full, queen, and king, in ascending order. The basic sizes for British beds, respectively, are single, doubleking, and super-king. Single bed and double bed are understood and used in the US, but they are not precise bed sizes there. For example, in AmE I could say that a (AmE) cot/(BrE) camp bed is a 'single bed' (it fits a single person), but not that it's a 'twin bed', because twin is a particular size. Two twins make an AmE king--as one can find to one's back-breaking and love-dampening horror in hotels where they make AmE-king-size beds out of two twins and a king-size sheet. (You said king-size bed! Singular! I want my money back!!)

So, if you buy king-size fitted sheets in one country, they won't work as king-size in the other. Will the other sheets transfer? Probably not exactly.

Here's the relevant part of Wikipedia's table of sizes, with the differences between US and UK highlighted. (Australia is different in other ways--see Wikipedia for the whole story.) Note that double/full are recorded here as the same--but it's a bit tricker than that.


Mattress size (width × length)

N. America[1]
UK/Ireland[3]

Single
Twin (USA)
39in × 75in
0.99 m × 1.91 m

36in × 75in
0.9 m × 1.90 m




Double/full 54in × 75in
1.37 m × 1.91 m

54in × 75in
1.37 m × 1.91 m




Queen
King (UK/Ire.)

60in × 80in
1.52 m × 2.03 m
60in × 78in
1.5 m × 2 m


King
Super King (UK/Ire.)
76in × 80in
1.93 m × 2.03 m

72in × 78in
1.83 m × 1.98 m




California King

72in × 84in
1.83 m × 2.13 m





Much of the rest of the story is told by these handy-dandy diagrams from Wikipedia.  Here's American bed sizes (XL = extra long).


And here are the UK sizes--with an error that needs correcting: the prince size (a term I've never heard in the wild) should be small double (not small single--which is elsewhere in the diagram).


So, sheets for a US full-size should fit a UK double, but only if it's not a funny kind of double. The small double or three quarter is also advertised as a four-foot (or 4ft) bed (or sheet size) (like here).

Of course, if you buy your beds at IKEA, then that's a whole other kettle of Swedish fish.  (Wikipedia has more on other countries' bed sizes as well.)

The UK bed sizes are reflected in housing descriptions. A house or (BrE + San Francisco) flat/(general AmE) apartment will be advertised, for example, with "3 double bedrooms"
or just "3 double rooms". This means 'big enough to fit a double bed'. And it often means just that: big enough to fit a double bed in, but good luck getting a (BrE/general E) bedside table/(AmE) nightstand in there.

There is a lot to say about bed linens beyond the size issues that I've approached here. But in the spirit of trying for more posts rather than longer posts, I'll save that for next time.


Read more

cupboards and closets

I've got a few posts brewing in my head that require me to (a) take my camera out with me and (b) remember to take pictures of the relevant things when I get to them. So far, I've only managed (a), which, it must be admitted, is pretty pointless without (b). But there's a lot of pointless activity in my life at the moment, like an afternoon investigating new textbooks after being told that mine couldn't be ordered--only to discover that the bookshop already had the books in stock, they just looked them up the wrong way. And waiting for the phone and internet to be re-connected after my neighbo(u)r told the people working on our house that the wires at the front of the building were extraneous and should be removed. And investigating and correcting the recent mistaken change to my tax code which left me paying three times as much as I owed this month. It's the camera one that really irks me though, since it's the only one I must blame myself for.

So with those plans thwarted, I have clicked onto a random post in my 'to be posted about' mailbox and found JHM, writing:
I've been on an Agatha Christie binge of late, and have subsequently been up to my eyeballs in potential questions on BrE. Seeing as these stories were written between the 30s and the 70s, however, it becomes complicated from your vantage, because even trying to compare fifty-year-old AmE usage to modern AmE would present problems.

Even so, one usage that seems fairly consistent over time, and that tends to confuse me, is the BrE use of "cupboard." I see that you've covered this to some degree, but I still have a few questions. [...] My word for the small, doored-off areas either hanging from the ceiling or under a [ed: AmE] countertop is cupboard (which I pronounce /cubbard/, making it a further annoyance when I see the word spelt, as the two seem not to match at all, and besides which, my "cups" usually hang from hooks below the cupboard, and are one of the few items not to be found inside one). So, first minor question is whether BrE by and large has the same pronunciation.

Now, it seems to me that BrE never seems to use closet, but prefers cupboard for just about anything that has a door. In my case, a cupboard is never something in which a corpse (at least one still in one piece) could be either found or put, but this seems commonplace in my stories. What are the bounds of the BrE cupboard, when does closet become more likely, and is all of this an artifact (ed: BrE artefact) of obsolete usage?
First, let me recommend that people who haven't read it click on the link to get to the post on (BrE) Welsh dresser, since it answers some questions. It's one of those sad posts from the beginning of the blog that would have received many more comments had I had readers at the time. Please feel free to comment on it there--it's never too late to comment on this blog's posts and it's one of those posts that gets a lot of hits via search engines, so your comment may help someone nice. Or possibly someone nasty. But if you help someone nasty, you're still being nice. Unless you're aiding and abetting in something nasty, that is. And I don't think anyone could hold you accountable and take away your niceness badge if your comment happens to lead to the Great Welsh Dresser Robbery of 2011 or the exploits of the Countertop Ripper in 2015.

I expect JHM that your rendition/rendering of the pronunciation is a bit misleading in terms of the second vowel. Since the stress is on the first syllable, most people would pronounce it with schwa-type sound. So, it sounds more like the word bird than bard. Like you, the British do not say 'cup-board', so the word is pronounced similarly in AmE and BrE--except for the way in which you'd expect it to differ: in what is done with an /r/ after a vowel.

On the meaning, one of the reasons why one doesn't hear closet much in BrE is because there just aren't many of them. Our current (three-bedroom) home has none. Our last (two-bedroom home) had none. My first (one-bedroom) home here had none. Instead, people generally keep their clothes in free-standing wardrobes, which move from house to house with them. (I have met/needed this beast only once in my dozen or so past American abodes.) Most Americans will be familiar with the furniture sense of the word just from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe--but I'm not sure that all reading the book would recogni{s/z}e that the wardrobe isn't a closet. Closets are becoming more popular in the UK in new-build/remodel(l)ed homes.

But that aside, BrE has held on to other meanings of closet to a greater degree/longer than AmE has. The original meaning was 'a private room' and this has been extended in various ways to refer to small rooms in general or small rooms of particular types. The OED tells me that this meaning is (or was when that entry was written) common in the North of England, Scotland and Ireland, where bed-closet means 'a small bedroom'. That meaning seems to have gone by the wayside in AmE, probably because there are so many storage-closets there. So, the small rooms in American homes are for storage, the word for small rooms closet is applied to them, there are no smaller rooms in the homes, so it's odd to refer to bigger rooms as closets too, and eventually people no longer reali{s/z}e that they could be using the word for other types of rooms. At least, that looks like a likely progression of events.

This has some knock-on effects idiom-wise. A skeleton in the closet (which goes back at least to the 19th century in BrE) transmogrifies into a skeleton in the cupboard in modern BrE, while it stays in the closet in AmE. On the other hand, (orig. AmE) come out of/be in the closet (as gay, etc.) has been imported directly into BrE. One can find a few instances of come out of the cupboard or come out of the wardrobe (as gay) on UK websites but they're few and far between. It's possible, though, that the imagery for the two is not quite the same in AmE and BrE minds. Do Americans imagine the closet-dweller as hunched among hangers and clothes and shoes and British people imagine them as just being in a small, private room? I imagine that the range of imaginings on an individual level vary a lot no matter where one lives.

Some types of closets in AmE are cupboards in BrE (or vice versa), such as a broom closet/cupboard. But this discussion reminds me that RMWG (another of my frequent, initial[l]ed correspondents) wrote a long time ago:
My American colleague is having problems with the concept of airing cupboards. I have done my best to explain, but as an American who presumably now has experience of them, perhaps you could do better.
Airing cupboards are called the same thing in the US, there are just far fewer of them. I got to know them in old houses in New England. More Americans would have a (non-airing) linen closet, which in BrE would be a linen cupboard.

On our recent trip to the US, Better Half didn't know what I meant when I said that I wanted to give a donation to the local food closet, which is run by a friend of our family. Food closet is essentially the same as (orig. AmE) food bank, the term that has come to be used in the UK (and is still used in the US too). I read with some surprise the Swindon Food Bank's claim that food banks are a 'ground-breaking concept'--since they've been around for decades in the US. But the first one in the UK was founded only in 1999.

Of course, closet is also found in the BrE term water closet, but please go back here to discuss that.

Back to JHM, he followed up his first email with:
[...] my reading has introduced me to the boxroom which, aside from their being convenient places to try to hide potentially incriminating evidence, seem to answer to an American's description of a closet. Is boxroom still in use? is it readily recognizable, if not commonplace?
I've never come across box(-)room in the wild, and the OED defines it only as 'a room for storing boxes, trunks, etc.'. It looks like it has developed in meaning a little bit, judging from this exchange on Gumtree:
> Hi, I'm currently looking for a place to live in London, and I'm simply wondering what a "box room" is?
>>
very small room often with no window.
>>>
or it can simply mean a very small single room, where you can just [s]queeze a bed & small desk or bedside table in - I'd ask about the window for each property - as I've never looked at a box room that didn't have a window personally, but I can see how in Cities that could apply! - I expect people try to rent out broom/laundry cupboards as commutor [sic] "bedpods"
>>>>
studio flat for £180 per week in zone 1 or 2 Laughing [link added for clarification--ed.]
In sum, I'd have to say that it's not a closet in the AmE sense and is not used all that much for storage rooms these days. Better Half adds that he gets the connotation of 'no windows' with box room, and that the adjective boxy is applied to rooms to mean that there's no room to swing a cat. (Not that good-conscienced, vegetarian BH has ever tried the cat-swinging bit.) To my AmE ears, a boxy room would just be one that has only 90-degree angles and probably walls of a uniform size.

Since we were corresponding at Thanksgiving time last year, JHM added:
As a seasonal bonus question, I wonder if you could discuss the use of the word larder in BrE [...]. I recognize the word, but don't have any idea how I might use it. There is the pantry, a small closet for dry goods, and the aforementioned cupboard, and the refrigerator (which seems to me what is referred to by larder in my stories. My grandfather would have used an ice box before refrigerators, but larder brings to my mind images of a cave, or walk-in refrigerator (perhaps since it sounds a bit like lair, I couldn't say). Does modern BrE have larders? What are they?
As the name hints at, larders were originally for storing bacon or other meats in the pre-refrigeration days. It is still used by extension for a large cupboard where food is stored. So, some old homes may have larders, which should be cooler than the rest of the house. (E.g. they may be on a side of the house that gets no sun or may have stone or porcelain parts to help keep the temperature down.) There's some information on BrE dialectal terms for larder in this Wikipedia entry. These days, one hears it in contexts like raid the larder, used like raid the refrigerator to mean something like 'get snacks'.

AmE ice box (or icebox) is still sometimes heard, having shifted its meaning from a literal 'box with ice' to 'refrigerator'. It's what my grandparents usually called the fridge. In some AmE dialects ice chest is used--though for many people that would refer to an insulated (orig. AmE) cooler (BrE: cold/cool box and these days one often gets cool bags--which reminds me, I need to get one. How about this one?). I can't imagine that there are many people under 60 years old using these terms for refrigerators--but feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. One does still see/hear it in the names of certain sweet recipes.

As a cultural aside, Americans might wonder how the British live without built-in storage space. (UK houses also rarely have basements and residents may not have much--or any--access to an attic.) The answer is simple: they generally keep less stuff. I'm always reminded of this when I visit the US and see the seasonal stuff that a lot of people decorate their homes with. During our August visit, the shops there were already full of Hallowe'en (BrE) tat like this and plenty of people in my hometown decorate their porches with an ever-changing display of seasonal flags or banners like these. Some have special sets of china or linens for Christmas as well as decorations for every room and the great outdoors. One just doesn't see all this much in the UK. Where would you put it when it's out of season? Rather than sticking something that has outlived its usefulness or stylishness into a cupboard, closet or attic, a lot of UK residents would drop it by the nearest (or dearest-to-them) (BrE) charity shop/(AmE) thrift store. People often brought in single items or small bags of things to the shop where I used to work and we keep a constant 'Oxfam bag' going in the house--whereas I think Americans usually do their charity-giving after bigger clear-outs--often just before moving (house) or after dying (in which case they get out of doing most of the packing themselves). I must admit that some gifts I've received from some Americans (who do not appreciate that I have nowhere to put that cute/funny/weird thing that made them think of me--our place is smaller than a single floor of their three-stor(e)y+basement+garage houses) have gone straight to the charity shop. But not yours, of course. I cherish that. It is just so really, really extra cute and weird.
Read more

carts and trolleys

This entry is inspired by a BBC News headline about a court case regarding a tragic event here in Brighton:

Reversing dustcart 'caused death'

The headline left me with a touch of cognitive dissonance, since in AmE carts tend to be small, relatively powerless things--like the cart that a donkey might pull or a go-cart. And dust, well, is dust. It wouldn't need a large vehicle, would it? But, of course, a (BrE) dustcart (which is staffed by dustmen) is what Americans would call a garbage truck (staffed by garbage men--though, of course, in both countries I'm sure that their official job titles are suitably euphemistic). In the BBC News article, they also refer to the vehicle as a refuse lorry (=AmE truck--kind of...but that's another post for another time).


So, it left me thinking of other kinds of carts. Like (AmE) shopping carts, which in BrE are shopping trolleys. Which made me think of other trolleys, like (BrE) tea trolleys or serving trolleys, which in AmE would be tea carts or serving carts. Which made me think of the announcement one hears at the (BrE) railway station/(orig. AmE) train station: "A trolley service of soft drinks and light refreshments will be available on this train." One usually has to go to the café car on an American train to buy refreshments, but if they did come around with refreshments-on-wheels, it would not be called a trolley service. In fact, the only AmE use of trolley that I can think of is one that the OED marks as AmE: "an electric car driven by means of a trolley", the latter trolley being a kind of pulley system. In the US these might also be called (as in San Francisco) cable cars. [See comments for correction of my understanding of the pulley system involved!] In the UK, such things are generally called trams--a term which no longer implies the use of a pulley system. The trams found in the UK would be called streetcars in many dialects of AmE. The OED marks an AmE sense of tramway, referring to the cables on which suspended cars travel--but I can't claim any first-hand knowledge of that sense.

Photos from image-searching dustcart and tea trolley. For a past post on (BrE) rubbish/(AmE) garbage collection, see this one.
Read more

bowls

I'm embarrassed by how much television I've been watching lately. On further reflection, perhaps that's not true--maybe I'm just embarrassed by how much television I've found myself admitting to watching. But it does raise lots of bloggable issues, so here I go again with the admitting.

Better Half came home tonight to find me watching The Big Bang Theory with a sleeping baby on my lap. (My excuse: I was stuck--I couldn't very well disturb the baby, who hates to nap and so must be tricked into doing it on my lap. So, nothing to do but power up the remote control.) In this episode, the boys are preparing for the "Physics Bowl". When they started practi{c/s}ing for the Bowl with physics quiz questions, BH said, "Oh, that's what they're doing! I couldn't figure out why physicists would get so excited about bowling!"

The AmE bowl in Physics Bowl is the same as the more general College Bowl--a contest between (usually) students in which they answer (usually) academic questions. The UK equivalent to the College Bowl is University Challenge, a television program(me) in which students from different universities (or colleges within the Oxbridge/London universities) compete on television. (Perhaps some Americans will have seen this in the book/film Starter for Ten--if it was released over there...) University Challenge was based on the College Bowl, but it has overtaken its ancestor in terms of popularity. The College Bowl was televised in the US from the 1950s until 1970, but University Challenge is a television institution that's still very popular today. My own bowl experience was to be in the History Bowl when I was in the 8th grade. In that case, it was a county-wide competition for which I had to learn much more than I ever wanted to know about the Erie Canal. (I stayed home on the day of the final, insisting that I was [AmE-preferred] sick/[BrE-preferred] ill, but I think my mother was right in insisting that it was just butterflies. Oh, the regret.)

I'm fairly certain that the name of these kinds of contests (which hasn't made it into the OED or American Heritage) is derived from the use of bowl to refer to certain post-season football (=BrE American football) games, such as the Rose Bowl, which are played between (AmE) college (= BrE university) teams. (Plus the Super Bowl, which is played between professional teams.) They are so-called because of the bowl shape of the stadiums (or stadia, if you prefer--the spellchecker doesn't) in which they were first played.

The kind of bowl(ing) that Better Half was imagining is generally called bowling in AmE, but ten-pin bowling in BrE. (In AmE bowling can also refer to variants like candlepin bowling. You can look these things up if you'd like to know the difference! The social class implications of bowling in America are noted in the comments of a recent post.) This distinguishes it from the game more traditionally played in England, (lawn) bowls, which is closely related to the continental games boules/pétanque and bocce (which is the more familiar game in America, thanks to Italian immigrants). Another kind of bowling found in the UK (more than the US), particularly in the Southwest, is skittles, the game from which modern indoor bowling is derived. This provides me with an excuse to post one of my photos of the Children's Parade in the Brighton Festival. This year the theme was favo(u)rite games, and one school chose skittles. (It's not the best photo I took, but I've suddenly had qualms about posting a photo of other people's children.) In the US, I imagine most people would associate skittles with a (AmE) candy/(BrE) sweet.

(...which compels an anecdote. I was at a party in Waco, Texas once and met a man who told me he was in Research and Development at M&M/Mars, one of the bigger employers in town. I asked what he'd developed. His wife proudly put her arm in his and beamed, "He invented Skittles!" As you can see, one meets Very Important People in Waco. And I should join Anecdoters Anonymous.)

The verb to bowl is used to describe what one does with the projectile in all of these games, but is also used to describe how the ball is delivered (or not) to the bat in cricket--and hence the person who does that delivering is the bowler. The closest thing in popular American sports is the pitcher, who pitches a baseball.

Going further afield, another bowl that differs is found in the (AmE) bathroom/(BrE informal) loo. While AmE speakers clean the toilet bowl, BrE speakers stick their brushes into the toilet's pan. I'm not absolutely sure that BrE speakers don't also use bowl in this sense (do you?), but it jars whenever I hear people speak about the toilet pan, as it makes me imagine something very shallow.

Those are the bowl differences I've noticed myself, although the OED also gives a special Scottish English sense: a marble. Their only example is from 1826, so you Scots will have to tell us whether it's current!
Read more

creches, cribs and cots

Growing up, we always had a ceramic nativity scene (made by my Aunt Connie) on our mantel at Christmastime, and we always called it the nativity or the nativity scene. As I got older, I discovered that most other families called these things their (AmE) crèches. Until I moved away from the US (or started reading the word in non-US sources, I can't remember), that was the only English meaning of crèche that I knew. I was reminded of this limitation of AmE crèche this summer, when my mother was in town and confused by a sign for a local (BrE) crèche, which is to say a (AmE) day care center for babies. We find the 'nativity scene' meaning of crèche in the OED, but with no BrE examples after 1963. That doesn't mean such examples don't exist, of course, (you can see some at this UK Catholic gift retailer), but crèche certainly isn't the most common BrE name for such things. In fact, if one looks up 'Christmas crèche' on UK Internet sites, most hits are about (orig. AmE) babysitting/(BrE) child-minding services--or in this case, a man-minding service.

Instead, the more common BrE name for such scenes is the Christmas crib, with (BrE) crib referring specifically to a manger, as detailed by the OED:
1. A barred receptacle for fodder used in cowsheds and fold-yards; also in fields, for beasts lying out during the winter; a CRATCH. (In nearly all early quots. applied to the manger in which the infant Christ was laid; cf. CRATCH n.)
According to the OED, the extension of crib to nativity scenes was originally from the Roman Catholic church, and it may be the case that such scenes are more common in the UK in Catholic homes. In the US, they're nearly universal elements of Christmas decoration, but I don't recall seeing any in homes in the UK (yet), although there is a piece in Saturday's Guardian about the knit(ted) nativity scene (the author's term--not crib, creche, etc.--so that one seems to be dialect-neutral) that the author bought at Oxfam.

Now, of course, crib in AmE is the usual word for a baby's bed with barred sides, which in BrE would be called a cot, which in AmE means a (BrE) camp bed. But what I find funny about all this are the lyrics to the Christmas carol 'Away in a Manger':
Away in a manger,
No crib for His bed
The little Lord Jesus
Laid down His sweet head
According to cyberhymnal, the author of the first two verses is unknown, but it was originally published in a Lutheran book in Philadelphia, so we can probably assume American authorship or at least assume that Americans were responsible for the first English translation of the lyrics (if they were originally German, as the Telegraph claims). We probably should assume American authorship, since if you're a BrE speaker, the lyric seems to mean 'Away in a manger, no manger for a bed'. Nevertheless the British site carols.org.uk claims that this is "always the first carol that children are taught." (I'd like to see the research to back that up.) The only reference to 'no cot for a bed' that I've found on the web is a South African on alt.usage.english complaining "It's those damned Americans. They've even hijacked the Christmas carols". I don't see how we could have hijacked something that didn't exist before one of us made it up, but perhaps someone in South Africa should be considered a better authority on hijacking. (Oooh, Lynne's getting catty.)

Carols--particularly the ones one hears in church--vary a lot in the US and UK. The tune for 'Away in a Manger' differs in the two countries. Click here for the American tune, and here for the British one. I went to a local carol concert a couple of years ago, and found that I couldn't sing along to many of the songs, either because I'd never heard them before, or because the tunes were completely different from the ones I knew.

So...Merry (BrE informal) Chrimbo! Don't forget to nominate your favo(u)rite dialect-crossing words for the SbaCL Word of the Year!
Read more

Welsh dresser, hutch, counter and side


We bought this piece of furniture (from a charity shop) for our kitchen last week, and I am learning to call it a Welsh dresser. It is a low cabinet with an open case of shelves on top. It has a little surface in front of the shelves where one could, say, slice bread. I was stymied in trying to find an American equivalent for this--which may go to show that I am suffering attrition of my native dialect. I've been calling it a cabinet when describing it to Americans, but the more specific name for it is hutch (as I found after searching US furniture retailers' sites). This is a word I know, but perhaps I never got to know it well enough, as I'd never lived in a house with one before now. That's my excuse for forgetting it, at least. Better Half protests "Rabbits live in hutches!" Strictly speaking, according to the furniture sellers, it's the top part that's the hutch, but since I didn't know until recently that the top and bottom halves were separable, I've always assumed that the whole thing is a hutch. (Without the top hutch part, it would be a sideboard--as long as it's in the dining room or kitchen.)

BH often reduces Welsh dresser to dresser, as in We bought a dresser for the end of the kitchen. This, to me, is weird (technical linguistic term), since I think of a dresser as belonging in a bedroom or dressing room. I suppose one could dress a chicken on a Welsh dresser...

While we're in the kitchen...the built-in work surface is called the counter or countertop in AmE, but tends not to be called this in BrE. Location-wise, it's generally referred to as the side, as in The plates are on the side or Cut the carrots on the side (which, of course, is ambiguous). You wouldn't, however, say I bought a new side for the kitchen or The side is formica. Referring to the thing, instead of the location, it can be called a worktop or work surface.

The things with doors above and below the counter/worktop are what I would call kitchen cabinets. Better Half calls them kitchen cupboards, which also works in American English. In BrE, it seems, a cabinet is free-standing.
Read more

The book!

View by topic

Twitter

Abbr.

AmE = American English
BrE = British English
OED = Oxford English Dictionary (online)