Grover and I like to play a bit of (BrE) cod-Pictionary, using the cards from a UK edition of Cranium. She's 8 now, and I've been pretty impressed by her ability to communicate in pictures. So recently we were playing and she drew these two things (here kindly re-drawn for your benefit, as I misplaced the original).
Grover and her dad and the makers of Cranium all knew the expression, but this was the first I'd met it (though I now see it's also the name of a wallpaper that I see often). But though I knew exactly the thing that dandelion clock refers to, I had no expression for it.
Since we're in Untranslatable October, this was exciting, but then I asked my US friends whether they had a word for dandelion clock and some did--either dandelion puff or dandelion puffball. As many American friends had no word for the thing. I'd probably say white dandelion head or dandelion that's gone to seed or something like that. There didn't seem to be a regional pattern to having a name for it or not--some who had a name grew up in the same town as me and still live nearby.
The words don't seem to be all that common--probably the kind of thing that stays on the playground. There are 4 BrE dandelion clock(s) on the Corpus of Global Web-Based English. The only dandelion puff was in the British section, but written by a North American in a comments section of a blog. (Why you can't always trust nationalities on GloWBE.) In the Corpus of Contemporary American English, there are 9 dandelion puff(s) and 2 dandelion puff(-)ball. There are also two dandelion clock(s) in COCA--one by a British author (AS Byatt) and one with someone using it as if it means the individual seeds, rather than the head.
So I got to learn three new words (for I do consider compounds to be words even if they've got a space within them) from two countries for one thing. Not bad for a day's pictionary.
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Forgot to mention last time: I'm on the Talk the Talk podcast, chatting with the hosts about the language of the 2nd US presidential debate (after Dan Everett talking about Universal Grammar). The Quartz piece I did on Trump's the continues to get a lot of attention, including from Vox.
Have you got(ten) it? I recogni{s/z}ed the first thing as a dandelion with its seeds blowing away and the second thing as a clock face. So I just kept saying "Dandelion time?", to Grover's increasing frustration, until the timer ran out.
The answer was dandelion clock, leading me to ask: "What's that supposed to mean?"
Turns out that's a British name for the head of a dandelion once it's gone to seed. It's also the name of a game played with such dandelions. To quote Wiktionary:
(Bet you weren't planning to read the phrase filamentous achenes today.)A children's amusement in which the number of puffs needed to blow the filamentous achenes from a dandelion is supposed to tell the time.
Grover and her dad and the makers of Cranium all knew the expression, but this was the first I'd met it (though I now see it's also the name of a wallpaper that I see often). But though I knew exactly the thing that dandelion clock refers to, I had no expression for it.
Since we're in Untranslatable October, this was exciting, but then I asked my US friends whether they had a word for dandelion clock and some did--either dandelion puff or dandelion puffball. As many American friends had no word for the thing. I'd probably say white dandelion head or dandelion that's gone to seed or something like that. There didn't seem to be a regional pattern to having a name for it or not--some who had a name grew up in the same town as me and still live nearby.
The words don't seem to be all that common--probably the kind of thing that stays on the playground. There are 4 BrE dandelion clock(s) on the Corpus of Global Web-Based English. The only dandelion puff was in the British section, but written by a North American in a comments section of a blog. (Why you can't always trust nationalities on GloWBE.) In the Corpus of Contemporary American English, there are 9 dandelion puff(s) and 2 dandelion puff(-)ball. There are also two dandelion clock(s) in COCA--one by a British author (AS Byatt) and one with someone using it as if it means the individual seeds, rather than the head.
So I got to learn three new words (for I do consider compounds to be words even if they've got a space within them) from two countries for one thing. Not bad for a day's pictionary.
------
Forgot to mention last time: I'm on the Talk the Talk podcast, chatting with the hosts about the language of the 2nd US presidential debate (after Dan Everett talking about Universal Grammar). The Quartz piece I did on Trump's the continues to get a lot of attention, including from Vox.
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