Showing posts sorted by relevance for query water. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query water. Sort by date Show all posts

Untranslatables VI: the summary

Nov 2, 2016
As previously announced, this was the sixth October during which I tweeted an 'British–American untranslatable' (that is, item lexicalized in one national dialect and not the other) on each weekday. If you'd like to complain that any of these does not qualify as 'untranslatable', please first read my provisos about what's meant by untranslatable in this context.

This year's was a bit British-heavy, though in looking back on previous years, I noticed that some had more American ones, so perhaps it all works out in the end. 

BrE rough sleeper  'homeless person who's sleeps outside, as opposed to in a shelter or other temporary accommodation'.  Suggested by John Kelly (@mashedradish)

BrE gongoozler originally, 'an idler who watches canal activities', now more broadly, 'a person who stares for long periods'.  Suggested by Andy M. (on Facebook)
source

AmE to t-bone '(for a motor vehicle) to crash into another vehicle perpedicularly'.  Suggested by Rhonda (on blog). (This one has started to have currency in UK—but the steak cut that it's named after is not traditional in UK butchery.)

BrE busman’s holiday 'leisure time spent doing something very much like what you do at work'. There are some variants used (a little) in the US, but the ultimate source is this phrase. See World Wide Words. Suggested by

AmE to kick the tires 'to determine the worth or "health" of something by testing it'. Suggested by @SimonKoppel. This has spread beyond the US, with some people (Australians, in my correspondence) interpreting it specifically as something done by people with no intention to buy. I liked the OED entry that says it's orig. U.S. Not with that spelling, it's not!


BrE (to give someone a) backie (also backy)  '(to give someone a) ride on the BrE parcel shelf of a bicycle'. Suggested by @formosaphile. Responses to this tweet brought up a lot of variants: Australian dink, dinky, New Zealand dub, and a number from the UK, which Moose Allain has put together into a slide show. But none from the US, as far as I've heard.

AmE third base (etc.) as measures of sexual accomplishment. Covered previously here.  Suggested by @Mburked

BrE love rat tabloid term for a male adulterer. Here's Collins Dictionary on it. (Sorry, someone suggested this, but I failed to note who!)

AmE candy striper a usually female, usually teen-aged hospital volunteer. Suggested by @CityMelzer A bit more on the term from Wikipedia.

BrE to blot one's copybook  'to do damage to one's own good reputation'. Here's the discussion of it at World Wide Words.

BrE Johnny Foreigner '[pejorative] personification of non-Britishness', often used satirically. Here's the Collins entry for it.

AmE big box store 'box-shaped single-company retail building at the edge of town'. Possible BrE translations discussed at Wikipedia.  Ta

BrE for in, for example, 7:00 for 7:30, which means 'come after 7, but by 7:30, when things will get started'. Or, as Andrew Caines defined it: "You'll be rude if you arrive up to and including 7:00, or any time after 7.29". 

AmE condo(minium) 'building consisting of residential units that are individually owned' or 'an individually-owned unit within such a building'. In AmE condo generally contrasts with apartment (building)—the former is rented, the latter owned. In UK, they're called (blocks of) flats regardless of owned/rented status. In some parts of the US, there are also co-ops. The difference between condos and coops is explained here. I'd tried to conceptualise this in terms of the difference between flat ownership with a leasehold versus a share of the freehold in England, but that's not right (see comments). Suggested by @RebelePublisher 

BrE I’ll be mother 'I'll serve the tea [or other food/drink that needs serving-out]'  Suggested by Rhonda on the blog.

BrE graunch used as a verb or noun onomatopoetically for a grinding/crunching sound, as when gears in a car grind. (OED lists this as [UK] dialectal & New Zealand.) Suggested by April23rd on blog.

AmE (esp. Californian) lookie-loo (and spelling variants) 'nosy person who goes to (AmE) real-estate open houses with no intention of buying'. It's also used (esp. in other parts of the country) as a synonym for (orig. AmE) rubber-necker. Suggested by Michèle, seconded by @cynderness.

BrE paddle 'go into water (especially the sea) without swimming, particularly walking in up to the knees or so'. In AmE, I'd just say wade, which isn't specifically about getting your feet wet for fun. Suggested by @simonkoppel.

AmE Monday morning quarterback 'person who criticizes others using hindsight the others couldn't have had'

BrE ready reckoner 'quick-reference table that gives solutions to simple calculations'. AmE has things like cheat sheet, quick reference, but those could be, say, lists of definitions, rather than a table of calculations.

BrE glamour model euphemistic expression for 'woman who poses topless' (particularly for certain UK newspapers and BrE "lads' magazines").

Will I find enough for a seventh year in 2017? I've already started the list, so maybe.  Feel free to keep suggesting them! Thanks to everyone who's helped this time.
Read more
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , | 115 comments

packing peanuts and monkey nuts

May 21, 2007
How am I avoiding marking/grading? Let me count the ways... Every time I finish a dissertation (which in AmE would be called a thesis, since it's an undergraduate piece; thesis and dissertation are used in reverse ways in BrE and AmE), I reward myself by going on-line. I probably read more on-line in my breaks than I read on paper in the work times (which means that the work times then extend through the night in order to stay on schedule). It's just so much more pleasant to read things that don't involve me having to make a formal judg(e)ment about them, which I'll later have to defend to someone else (second examiner, external examiner) and which I'll later have to live with--and live with the knowledge that someone else has to live with it. Don't get me wrong, I'm reading some really good work, but still I find the process emotionally draining.

But I've taken so many reading breaks that I've pretty much read the Internet now. Well, everything in my bookmarks, at least. So on this little dissertation break, I'll write instead of reading. Some time ago, I ripped the following bit from the Guardian, intending to write about it later. (Welcome to Later.) It's from a piece in the Work section on April Fool's pranks for the office:
Fill a desk with peanuts
According to the interweb, Americans love filling other people's desk drawers with peanuts. Handy for a snack--but read the small print. These are packing peanuts (whatever they are), and therefore not edible. Ridiculous! I'll be going straight for the dry-roasted KPs [a UK brand of peanut--L]. Open those drawers wide. [Vicky Frost, 'Pick a prank for the delayed April Fool', The Guardian, 31 Mar 2007]
Now, usually I will defend the Grauniad, but here I cannot. Vicky Frost, what kind of reporter are you if you have to write "whatever they are" in an article? (OK, an article that is meant to be taken as humorous, but an article nonetheless.) Research, darling, research! (This is starting to feel like marking/grading. Uh-oh.)

I was reminded to find and write about this item (in my staggering tower of things to write about) when BH and I walked by a packing supply shop/store the other day. Its sign advertised that it sells loosefill. Now, this is trade jargon (used in the US too), not BrE particularly, but it gave me cause to ask BH "Is that what you'd call packing peanuts?" and he guessed that it would be the name for them, though not a word that he'd necessarily use. He'd probably just call them annoying polystyrene (=AmE styrofoam) bits, or some such thing. (The photo of a particularly miscellaneous collection of packing peanuts comes from this blog.)

Packing peanuts are so-called in AmE because of their typical shape, like a whole peanut (i.e. with its shell on). Perhaps this name is not so transparent in BrE because the word peanut is generally restricted to the shelled nuts (technically not nuts, but legumes; but since this isn't a botany blog, we'll just call them nuts). The shell-on version are sold as monkey nuts. (Stop that tittering!) Packing monkey nuts just doesn't have the same ring. (Photo 'borrowed' from this blog.)

Incidentally, I haven't run into cornstarch "peanuts" in the UK, though they are a wonderful invention, as they melt in water, making them completely biodegradable. Of course, it's the corn (BrE maize) growers of America, trying to find more things for us to do with corn/maize, that are behind this--so not terribly surprising that you don't find them here. (Just as you're more likely to find cars running on ethanol in the US.) Still, I really like them, as they're relatively guilt-free packaging.

P.S. I had a Canadian count double-whammy yesterday (at a Scrabble tournament--these happen often in Scrabble contexts). A player (whom I've known for a few years now) expressed surprise when I mentioned going to the US to see my family. She said "Oh, you're not Canadian?" And then added "I told A [another player from her town] that you were American, but he was so insistent that you were Canadian..." So, those are numbers 8 and 9 on the Canadian count.
Read more
Labels: , , , , | 22 comments

levee, dyke, embankment

Apr 25, 2016
Embankment station District Circle roundel I'm often told (by Brits) that Americans are prudes when it comes to language. And I can often demonstrate the error or hypocrisy in their claim. Tidbit/titbit is one I've covered here so far. Another one is levee, which an Englishman informed me is used because Americans don’t want to say (AmE) dike/(BrE) dyke for a built-up bank to prevent the overflow of water.

So let me count out my objections to his claim:

1. Levee has been used in North America since the 18th century. (Orig. AmE) dyke has only been (slang (or a hyponym) for 'lesbian' since the 20th century. So, Americans definitely didn't start saying levee to avoid association with lesbians.


2. If you're an American like me, you primarily know levee from Don McLean's song American Pie, where it is a convenient rhyme for Chevy. (This is at the top of the 'Lynne's most hated songs' list. I hope I haven't earwormed you with it. My day is ruined.) I think of it as a Louisiana thing (it is used all the way up the Mississippi River), and that's where it came into English, from French. (That part of the continent came into the US with the 1803 Louisiana Purchase.) It may be more common now that people have heard it more in the news because of extreme weather in the Gulf States, but I still think of it as a vaguely regional term, rather than pan-American.

3. I only really knew the word dike from the story of the Little Dutch Boy. Where/when I grew up, I'd've  called it a little dam (because we weren't put off by the homophony with damn either!) But note the spelling. The main American spelling of this thing is dike, whereas the 'lesbian' sense is usually spelled/spelt dyke, which which Merriam-Webster lists as 'chiefly British variant of dike'.  So, in printed form, at least, the 'taboo' sense and the 'built up bank by the river' geographic (or is it architectural?) sense are a bit more linked. Living in the 'gay capital of Britain' near a place called Devil's Dyke, I can tell you that the British are aware and amused by the punning potential. In that sense, though, it tends to be for a natural feature, not an artificially built-up place by a river.

4. It’s not like the British are freely going about saying dike for the meaning 'levee'. They tend to prefer the word embankment for such things. Who are the prudes now?


(The green (more BrE) bits above were added after first posting.)
Read more
Labels: , | 51 comments

dishpan hands

May 8, 2007
A colleague who teaches French knocked on my door today to ask about an Americanism that his student had encountered in a translation exercise: dishpan hands. The student was imagining someone with hands shaped like dishpans. Oh no!

Dishpan hands are hands that have spent too much time in the dishwater--i.e. they've suffered the drying effects of soap and water. I was amused to see that it's a condition that's listed in the Houghton-Mifflin Medical Dictionary--I had no idea it had reached disease status! Oh, how we suffer.

Dishpan is an AmE word for the basin in which one washes dishes, though I wouldn't use the term myself, as it sounds old-fashioned to me. But I see that Rubbermaid use(s) the term, as do lots of other folk on the web, so what do I know? I'd probably say dishwashing basin (as do some others on-line) and others also say dishwashing tub. In BrE, it is called a washing up bowl. Here's a beautiful one from Norman Copenhagen. I can't decide whether I wish I could afford a £35 dishpan/washing-up bowl (though the brush is included!), or whether I think I'd disgust myself if I spent that kind of money on trying to look cool while (AmE) doing the dishes/(BrE) washing up. I just (BrE, informal) bung everything into the dishwasher anyhow.

Thinking about dishpan hands reminded me of a recent interaction with Better Half, in which he was searching for something-or-other that was right in front of him. I exclaimed, You're soaking in it! (I do a lot of exclaiming), only to discover that he had never had the joy of Madge the Manicurist in ad(vert)s for Palmolive (AmE) dish detergent/(BrE) washing-up liquid. I believe you can see one of those ad(vert)s here (though I don't have the plug-ins to see it on the computer I'm on now). Catchphrases don't travel well through time or space.
Read more
Labels: , , | 32 comments

sick and ill

Jan 6, 2010
I'm pleased to welcome my former student, Solo, for her second guestblogging service here on SbaCL.  Take it away, Solo:


The Oxford Dictionary of English informs me that sick is an adjective meaning “affected by physical or mental illness,” suggesting that illness is the dominant term. Furthermore, to my BrE mind, the generic term when one is suffering from any form of malady is ill, which covers generally feeling unwell right through to serious, long-term affliction.  (The definition of ill incidentally is “suffering from an illness...”.)

I would have said the exception was poorly for the under-fives, but previous comments on this blog suggest most Britons consider poorly an old-fashioned or locali{s/z}ed Yorkshire expression to mean ‘very seriously ill in hospital’. In my personal (Southern) experience however, it’s just a word said to small children with stomach bugs.

The obvious transatlantic synonym is, of course, sick, which receives reasonable employment on this side of the pond too.  I’d argue that ill  is favo(u)red over here, however, it would seem that sick has broader meaning for AmE speakers than for BrE.

Case in point: I recently asked an American (and long-term UK resident) colleague how she was. She did seem a little under the weather. She replied “I’ve been sick.” My response to this was {sympathetic face/noise} “Oh, what was wrong?” To demonstrate the thought process here, I heard sick in an AmE accent and automatically translated to ill. If a fellow Brit had told me they’d been ill, that would probably mean they’d  had some specific, diagnosable malady.  I therefore anticipated greater explication at this stage in the conversation, e.g. “I’ve had a cold/flu/a stomach bug/malaria.” However, she simply reiterated “I’ve been sick.” As though this were explanation in itself. In my idiolect a reiteration like that would be followed with a slightly patroni{s/z}ing "haven’t I?" It therefore transpires that sick was not merely an umbrella term covering all manner of sickness, but also had some specific connotation for the AmE speaker; perhaps something akin to run down? If we say we are run down it means not feeling one’s best due to maybe working too hard, not getting enough sleep/exercise or eating badly, but without having an actual illness.

Sick in the ‘unwell’ sense does of course enjoy widespread popular use in BrE, but, I’d argue, with nowhere near the prevalence with which it is used in AmE. Exceptions would be compound phrases such as off sick (AmE equivalent: taking a sick day) and the related sick pay. Then there are sickness benefits, paid to those unable to work for health reasons. *Illness benefits would grate on British ears. So these are exceptions in which sick is used in BrE, but with very specific applications. Then there’s the very British sickie, which is the act off taking a day off (from) work claiming ill-health when actually either hungover or simply not in the mood for a day’s work. AmE phrases like sick day have become codified in the lexicon of the workplace, so on an application form one would have to state how many sick days one had taken in the last two years, but I wouldn’t use the phrase independently, I’d just say I’d had the day off, or I was off sick.  [Lynneguist’s note: I've been asked how much BrE medical leave I've taken.  Disturbingly for an American, it's legal here for a prospective employer to demand medical info.  I recently read that that may change soon...] The prevalence of AmE expressions in work practice seems to be growing exponentially, but that’s a topic for another post.

Etymologically, my highly academic sources lead me to believe that somewhere around the turn of the last century ill was the common parlance amongst the common people and should they wish to better themselves and their manner of speaking they were encouraged to employ the term sick, as was the preference of the more socially advantaged.  I’m fairly confident this is no longer a class shibboleth, in the fashion of sofa/settee, but I have noticed the BrE use of sick in this context is far more prevalent amongst more senior generations, especially the better to do thereof.

To me, the most obvious meaning is the verb phrase form to be sick (AmE equivalent presumably to get sick). Context aside, this would typically be my first interpretation of the word. I always thought this meaning was very closely linked to the mass noun use of sick, a direct synonym of ‘vomit’. Oxford however tells me the mass noun use is an informal and specifically British application, which appeared sixth in their pecking order of definitions. So do AmE speakers find this use odd or improbable?


For an example the last time I was at Thorpe Park (the UK’s secondary theme park), we were made to wait at the front of the Colossus (BrE) queue/(AmE) line, where we heard the following announcement:
Thorpe Park apologi{s/z}e for the temporary delay. This ride is closed for essential cleaning. There is sick on one of the seats and we have to clean it, or it will be on you. We would like to remind passengers to keep all food and drink inside themselves at all times whilst on the ride.
For this reason I have a lot of trouble hearing/using I’ve been sick to mean I’ve had an illness. I would always process it to mean the action in the recent past and then from context would have to work out what the speaker actually meant. Is this too broad a generali{s/z}ation, BrE speakers?

After those interpretations there is also the implication of depravity, propagated particularly by the gutter press (Ban this sick filth!), which seems to carry equal weight on both sides of the water, and lastly, though by no means leastly, in the sociolect of the kids it is also an expression of approval originating in London, which has graduated to Brighton. For example, That is sick, bruv.  Or Those alloys are well sick, and such words to that effect. I have reason to believe this employment of the word has enjoyed perennial popularity amongst the AmE adolescent populace too, but the ‘unwell’ usage carries far more weight in the US than it does here and the colloquial use is therefore far less likely to affect its salience to such an extent, though whether older or more Northern BrE speakers would find that the current slang use of sick affects their processing is not something I can judge. So with that, I’ll throw open the floor…

Read more
Labels: , , , | 98 comments

recipe verbs

Mar 17, 2025

When I first moved to the UK, I hungrily watched the (orig. AmE) tv in my sublet apartment/flat in an attempt to acculturate myself. I can't remember if it was on an ad(vert) or on an early series of The Naked Chef, but I clearly remember the sentence:

            Just bung it under the grill!

I already knew grill (=AmE broiler) from my time in South Africa. It was bung (meaning something like 'put forcibly, carelessly') that struck me. It seemed such an unattractive word, and yet it was being used about some food that was supposed to be wonderful after the bunging. Was this telling me something about British attitudes to food and cooking? Was it supposed to make the dish-making seem so sloppy anyone could do it? The questions clearly stuck in my mind, because the phrase has stayed with me for 25 years.

Bung was the first thing to come to mind when Maryellen Macdonald wrote to me:

You have a long post about cooking word differences, but I don’t think it contains a discussion of “add” vs. “tip”. US recipes say things like “add the carrots” to the pan, whereas UK recipes say “tip in the carrots”.  My husband, the better cook in the household, asked me, “What do they mean tip the carrots? They’re cut up!” Hmm, maybe this little observation-ette isn’t quite sufficient for a post, but, perhaps you can use it somewhere.

I'm not sure which cooking-word difference post she was thinking of, since there are LOTS of them. But it made me think about "recipe verbs". Words like bung and tip are not necessarily cooking words—you can bung or tip a lot of things. But they are the kinds of words one finds in recipes or cooking programmes/shows. 

I started asking my friends for other recipe-verb differences they had noticed. One friend (thanks, David!) pointed me to this parody cooking series, Posh Nosh, in which Richard E. Grant and Arabella Weir are minor aristocracy with an upscale restaurant brand. This particular nine-minute episode includes many great (fake) cooking verbs, instructing you to interrogate (clean?) then later to thrill open your mussels, to pillage some bones and to "gently gush [some AmE broth/BrE stock] until it completely obsesses the rice."


My friends weren't great at coming up with verb differences. (Several nouns were suggested.) Thank you to Ben, Björn, David, Jason, Michèle, Wendi for their suggestions. To complement these, I ended up doing an Advanced Search in the Oxford English Dictionary for region-marked cooking verbs. This post then got stupidly long and AmE biased; the OED is not good at marking words that are general to British English but not to North American. 

For the following, I am marking things as AmE or BrE if either the OED or corpus results fairly firmly put the verb on one side of the Atlantic or the other. But you might know some of the "the other country's" words, especially if you ingest a lot of recipes and cooking programmes/shows. These things have been moving rapidly with mass media.

Some actual cooking verbs

Let's get the actual cooking verbs out of the way—some of these I've written about before:
  • AmE broil v BrE grill is (part of) the topic one of my first blog posts.  Also: 
    • AmE charbroil = cook over charcoal (not very frequent, more common in the modifier form charbroiled)
    • AmE panbroil = cook [meat/fish] in pan with very little fat 

  • AmE grill v BrE toast comes up in a long post about cheese sandwiches (BrE toasties)

  • AmE grill v BrE barbecue comes up in a post from the 4th of July

  • orig. AmE nuke & zap: (informal) to microwave

  • orig. AmE pot-roast: to slow-cook meat (esp. beef) in a covered pot/dish

  • orig. AmE stir-fry (but this has been in BrE for most of your lifetimes)

  • AmE plank: From OED: "Originally and chiefly North American. To prepare (meat, fish, etc.) by cooking it on a board over an open fire; (in later use) to cook on a board in an oven"

  • AmE shirr:  to poach (e.g. an egg) in cream rather than water. (I knew the word, but not what it meant!)

  • orig. AmE flip: Not really a recipe verb, but...from the OED:
transitive. Originally and chiefly U.S. To cook (items of food) by turning over on a hotplate, grill, or griddle. Now typically with the implication that the subject has a job in a fast-food restaurant (chiefly in to flip burgers).

Some verbs that are often used to modify food words

  • roast v roasted (of potatoes, chickens, etc.)—that post also mentions corn/corned beef, which has another post. 

  • skim v skimmed (of milk)

  • minced/ground

  • mashed & smashed:  I've written about mashed potato(es), which BrE can call just mash (now we're back into nouns). A related AmE verbal adjective is smashed. In the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (2013), North Americans have the collocation smashed potato(es); there are none in the British data. The distinction between mashed and smashed is that a smashed potato is less thoroughly mashed—it will still have some (orig. AmE) chunks of potato in it—and may well include the potato skins. 

    These days, you definitely see smashed on BrE menus—sometimes in front of potato but much more often in front of avocado. This Google ngrams graph shows that smashed avocado (blue line) surpassed mashed avocado (green line) in UK books around 2019, but the phrase has not taken off in the US (red line) in the same way, where people just talk about avocado toast without an adjective. (You hear that in BrE too, but it's not as prominent as in AmE.)


Verbs of placing

These are the ones we started with here. They're needed in recipes, but not exclusive to them:

  • BrE bung: to put forcibly, without delicacy. It's very informal word, but that goes with the vibe of a lot of British cooking shows. The closest equivalents are probably stick or throw (both General English), as in stick/throw it in the oven/pan, but bung feels the most informal and dismissive of the bunch. Here are some Google Image results for "bung it in the oven", which show the phrase applied to simple, quick recipes and the people who cook them:



  • BrE tip in means, essentially 'pour in', but it's often used for solids. It can apply to chopped carrots, as in Maryellen's example, because you're assumed to be tipping the chopping board over the pan and 'pouring' the carrots in. The magazine that just came with my grocery order has tip in its first two recipes: bread dough is tipped onto a floured surface. Cooked spinach is tipped into a sieve. 

  • add: Mrs Redboots suggested this one. Add is General English, of course, but she notes a different usage:

        American on-line cooks "add" ingredients to an empty pan.  Can you add something when there is nothing there?

  • pop: British people are always popping—popping in, popping out, popping to the shops—so I suspected that pop it in the oven would also show up as more BrE, but no. It looks like General English in the GloWbE corpus. Google Books has pop it in the oven becoming more common after the 1990s, with BrE use of the phrase overtaking American from 2014. 
    • AmE does seem to like to pop open various things, and BrE doesn't so much. This can include food/drink packaging (pop open a beer), but is often used of doors, the (BrE) bonnet/(AmE) hood or (BrE) boot/(AmE) trunk of a car, etc. Pop probably deserves it own post someday.

Verbs of mixing and cutting

In my experience, British kitchens are more likely to have (more AmE) immersion blenders / (more BrE) hand blenders / (slightly more BrE stick blenders) and American ones to have hand(-held) mixers (BrE also electric whisks). But I only go in the kitchens of those I know, so maybe that's quite biased. It would make sense, though, since UK soups are much more likely to be purées and, until the advent of the Great British Bake-Off, it seemed to me that Americans did more cake-baking (often with mixes, but still—using a mixer). 
  • (BrE) blitz: It sounds a bit slangy, but blitz is nearly the standard verb in BrE for using a blender, especially for short blasts—to the extent that some people call any kind of blender a blitzer. (I did not succeed in finding out how common this is, because the data is overrun with people named Blitzer and sports blitzers, etc.).  Blitz looks like it might be making it into US website recipes.

  • A wooden lemon reamer; it has a handle to hold and a fluted end for putting into a lemon and twisting about
    a wooden reamer
    whisk: This is general English, but only in BrE (and rarely) have I seen it used to refer to the action of using an electric mixer (with whisk-y attachments). It's thus used a lot more in UK recipes. 

  • beat [added 18 Mar 25]: I am looking at two cook(ery) books now, and see that Americans are always beating their ingredients where British bakers are whisking them. Neither word is particular to one nationlect, but the rates of usage seem quite different. (Click for an ngram of beat the eggs.)

  • (orig. AmE) rice to press through a holey surface or mesh to create very small pieces; some people have special ricers for this. Especially used with boiled potatoes to make mashed potato(es). 

  • (AmE) pull: to "stretch and draw" a mixture (usually AmE taffy) until it is aerated and ready to set. OED has this as "chiefly" AmE.

    And then there is the pull in pulled pork, pulled chicken, etc. OED has this as "chiefly U.S. in the late 20th century" (but it seems to have come back to the UK with US-style pulled pork).

  • (AmE) ream to juice a citrus fruit, using a device that you twist in the halved fruit. 

Verbs of baking/pastry

To drive upwards, or fasten up, by knocking; spec. in Bookbinding, etc. to make even the edges of (a pile of loose sheets) by striking them on a table; in Bootmaking, to cut or flatten the edges of the upper after its attachment to the insole.

          AmE knock up is a more general expression for 'prepare quickly'. So if you knock up a pie (or a three-course meal or anything else) in AmE, that's talking about the whole process of preparing it, from start to finish.

  • proof / prove In BrE, you prove dough and (traditionally) in AmE you proof it (unless you've watched lots of GBBO).

Verbs of preserving 

  • can v tin/bottle: Say you have tomatoes that you blanch and put into jars for use later in the year, in AmE that would be canning even though the tomatoes are going into a glass jar. You could also talk about canning if you were putting things in a jar to pickle, I think—it's just our general word for what to do when you have a glut of some fruit or vegetable that needs saving for later. The OED suggests tin (for putting things in metal containers) and bottle as BrE equivalents, but I think maybe for putting things in jars more general-English words like preserve and pickle might be more used? (Let us know in the comments.) Bottle would be used in AmE if you were putting things, like sauces or liqueurs, into bottles, but not usually for jars.

Verbs of meat preparation

  • French: this one (not in my vocabulary) I got from the OED:
transitive. Cookery (now chiefly U.S.). To prepare a joint by partially separating the meat from the bone and removing any excess fat.
  • tenderize orig. AmE, but has been in BrE since the 1970s


I'm sure you'll be able to think of some I've missed. Please add them in the comments!

Read more
Labels: , | 66 comments

go west/south

Dec 18, 2022

Jim recently (ish) wrote to ask me about this line he read in Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz:


At the time, I hadn’t completed a deal with the BBC and the whole thing could have gone west.



Jim wondered about that gone west, which seemed to be equivalent to AmE gone south. 

Twenty-some years in the UK, and I hadn't knowingly encountered that meaning of go west. But it's definitely out there.


Cambridge Dictionary gives the sense that Horowitz probably intended, and marks it as "UK informal".

Read more
Read more »
Labels: , | 21 comments

toilet

Mar 24, 2007
Howard wrote recently to ask:
What about the word Toilet? From correspondence and discussions with American friends, I am given to understand that this is very much a no-no word in AmE.
In AmE, toilet is used to refer to the porcelain receptacle for human waste, but not usually to the room in which it's situated. It can refer to either in BrE. So, toilet is a perfectly usable word in AmE when one wants to refer to the fixture, as in I stood on the toilet in order to change the lightbulb. But one wouldn't usually hear it in AmE in contexts in which is refers to the room, as in They were smoking in the girls' toilet(s). For someone who associates that word only with the porcelain object, it seems a bit too personal to say Where's the toilet?, since there's no doubt that bodily functions will be involved if you're asking for that porcelain object. On the other hand, asking for the room in which the toilet sits seems less personal, since there are lots of reasons to go to that room (e.g. to brush your teeth, get some toilet paper for blowing your nose, adjust your toupee...). So, one asks for the room, and no one is forced to contemplate bodily functions.

In AmE, bathroom has been used to euphemi{s/z}e 'toilet' for so long that go to the bathroom means 'evacuate one's bladder/bowels'. So, an unfortunate person might say to the doctor I have pain when I go to the bathroom. They don't mean that they knock their head on the door frame. Because bathroom = bodily functions, that word has become tainted as taboo, and thus other euphemisms like restroom and powder room have been invented for the room.

BrE has different reasons for having many names for the room with a toilet. One is that bathroom only indicates a room with a (BrE) bath/(AmE) bathtub, whereas in AmE it refers to a room with a toilet (and usually a sink, and possibly a bath(tub) or shower). I heard the following exchange a couple of years ago in the National Gallery (London) between a couple of American tourists and a cruel (and probably bored) security guard:
Tourist: Could you tell us where the restroom is?
Guard: Do you need a rest?
Tourist: Oh no--I mean the bathroom.
Guard: Why? Do you want to have a bath (=AmE take a bath)?
Tourists: *gasping for another word*
Guard: I can direct you to the ladies' toilets.
Since bathroom refers only to rooms with baths, toilet or loo is used for a room with a toilet/sink, and sometimes shower room is used for a room with a toilet, sink and shower. (To my AmE ears, that sounds like a room with just showers--such as one finds in a gym.) I remember as a child learning that the British say water closet or W.C., but it's not a very popular phrase today, at least not in the circles in which I travel. I've seen W.C. on public facilities far more often in France than in England. A term I wasn't prepared for but do hear a lot is en suite (bath/toilet) which refers to a room with a toilet (etc.) that is adjacent and private to a bedroom. This comes from French (bien sûr). En suite accommodation is a hotel (or bed-and-breakfast) room that has its own toilet/bathing facilities.

While/Whilst toilet is less taboo in BrE than in AmE, some people avoid it because it is déclassé* (or non-U, in BrE terms). The U (i.e. upper class) terms are lavatory (or lav for short) or loo. At school in the US, I was taught to ask to visit the lavatory. I can still recall my classmates' and my confusion as to why the bathroom was called the laboratory. I can also recall Sister Helen's exasperation with our insistence on saying labatory or labratory (the usual AmE pronunciation of laboratory).

When I first moved to South Africa, and was faced with not being understood when using AmE euphemisms for the room with the toilet in it, it caused me considerable discomfort to ask Where are the toilets? Loo came to the rescue, since it was clear to me that that referred to the room. But by the time I left SA, I'd got(ten) used to saying toilet when I needed one. You should've seen the looks on faces when I asked for the toilet on my first day at my new job in Texas. It was at a reception for faculty wives and female faculty. Yes, this university was so conservative that it was considered improper for faculty husbands and faculty wives to have luncheons on their own, so they avoided the problem by inviting the female faculty instead of their husbands. So there I was in a reception full of big-haired, proper Texan ladies (one of whom actually said to me 'It must be so good to be back in civili{s/z}ation'!) and I asked for the toilet. It was priceless.

*Déclassé can be used in AmE to mean 'reduced in social standing' (i.e. formerly higher status) or 'of low social status' (i.e. not originally at a higher status). The OED has only the former meaning, so I am unsure at the moment whether my use of déclassé here is AmE, or if the OED is just a bit out-of-date on that one. Better Half is away, so you'll have to be my guide.
Read more
Labels: , , , , , | 87 comments

plumbing the depths for words

Jul 8, 2006
I was at a party again today. It must be the party season, as I've got another to go to tomorrow. Thank goodness. If it weren't for parties, I'd just be sitting alone at my computer most of the time, not having interesting interactions with British English.

First thing to note about the party was that once again someone I'd just met assumed I was Canadian. I'm going to start keeping track of these. That'll be number 1.

Second thing to note is an interesting Cocktail Party Effect I experience. The Cocktail Party Effect is our ability to tune into one conversation and ignore others in a noisy environment, but while still apparently paying enough attention to the surrounding noise to switch our attention when someone in another conversation says our name. I've noticed that I switch attention when others say American or the States, etc. I can't help but (BrE) earwig (=eavesdrop).

Today I found myself listening to the end of a conversation between Better Half's Sister and Distant Relation. DR is an Englishman with a vacation home in South Carolina (first time I've come across that combination!). He's trying to supervise some plumbing work from a distance, and was saying that "everything there has a different name." I didn't catch all of the examples, but did get (BrE) tap versus AmE faucet and BrE bath vs AmE tub. I can add the following. Some of these you would hear in either country, but different words are preferred in the two countries.

AmEBrE
sink trapU-bend
sinkbasin
caulksealant
(toilet) tankcistern
hot-water heatergeyser (for certain types)


All of this ignores discussion of what to call a toilet or the room in which a toilet stands. I'm saving that for another time. [Now available here.] Meanwhile, can anyone add to the plumbing list? I know there are more differences out there...
Read more
Labels: , , | 18 comments
Subscribe to: Posts ( Atom )

The book!

View by topic

Abbr.

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