Re: Anglo-American communications studies
At 11:45 AM 1/9/01 +, Ken Brown wrote: >David Honig wrote: >> >> >>and there are very few opportunities for real misunderstanding. >> >> So Ken if you read that Blair was near Thatcher's house and knocked >> her up, Yanks would think something very different from Brits. > >You've been listening to those old Max Miller records again, haven't >you? No, a british (Birmingham) cell biologist used it in casual conversation in the early 1990s. I was struck by the humor of it at the time.
Re: Anglo-American communications studies
David Honig wrote: > > >>and there are very few opportunities for real misunderstanding. > > So Ken if you read that Blair was near Thatcher's house and knocked > her up, Yanks would think something very different from Brits. You've been listening to those old Max Miller records again, haven't you? And they are very old: "Have you heard about the girl of eighteen who swallowed a pin, but didn't feel the prick until she was twenty-one?" "I was walking along this narrow mountain pass - so narrow that nobody else could pass you, when I saw a beautiful blonde, with not a stitch on - yes, not a stitch on, lady. Cor blimey, I didn't know whether to toss myself off or block her passage." "Which would you like, the blue book or the white book? You like both don't you. Listen, I was in Spain four years ago and all the girls wear little knives in the top of their stocking. I found that out. So I said to myself, I'll find exactly what's the idea in wearing a knife on the top of the stocking and she said, that's to defend my honour, I said, what, a little tiny knife like that.. I said that, if you were in Brighton, you would need a set of carvers!" et.c et.c et.c So this woman walks into a pub and asks for a double entendre, and the barman says "Do you want a large one?"
Re: Anglo-American communications studies
Ray Dillinger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Mon, 8 Jan 2001, David Honig wrote: > > >At 08:17 AM 1/8/01 -0500, Ken Brown wrote: > >>and there are very few opportunities for real misunderstanding. We know > > > >The meaning of 'billion' differs by three orders of magnitude > >across the pond. That's plenty of room for confusion :-) No it doesn't 1,000 million is in more common use now. > And in the US, "billiards" is a game played with cues and balls > on a felt-covered slate table. In the UK, it's also a very large > number. Thankfully, so large that that definition rarely comes I have never heard "billiards" used as a number. -- 1024/D9C69DF9 steve mynott [EMAIL PROTECTED] whenever people agree with me i always feel i must be wrong. -- oscar wilde
Re: Anglo-American communications studies
on 1/8/01 2:54 PM, Jim Dixon at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > [Apologies for continuing this odd thread but ...] > > On Mon, 8 Jan 2001, Tim May wrote: > >>> Anyway - I heard Americans on the TV last week talking about "railway" >>> instead of "railroad". And "station" instead of "depot" (though Grand >>> Central Station is I suppose quite old, so you must have had that one >>> for a while) >> >> The most interesting Britishism to suddenly invade our shores and >> spread rapidly is "gone missing." I'm now hearing this in American >> movies, t.v. shows, and, importantly, television news. "The hunt is >> on for the fugitives in Texas who have gone missing." This is >> definitely new to our shores; I'm surprised (and pleased) at how >> rapidly it has spread. >> >> "At university" and "at hospital" have not become common (though "at > > The more common British term is "in hospital". I don't recall > ever hearing anyone say "at hospital". > > There are innumerable small distinctions in usage . If you are > in hospital, you are ill, not a member of the staff. > > Your being ill may the result of an injury. That is, the same > term covers both sicknesses and injuries. If you are in hospital > because of a broken back, people will say that you are ill. > > If you are sick, on the other hand, it means that you have vomited. > >> college" and "at school" are fully equivalent and are common). > > They aren't equivalent at all. In the UK [young] children go to > "school" and "college" generally refers to something very roughly > equivalent to either an American senior high school or junior > college. My company has university students spending a year or > so with us on placement; if you ask them when they are going back > to school, they tend to be offended, thinking you are poking fun at > them. Taking the mickey, that is. > > -- > Jim Dixon VBCnet GB Ltd http://www.vbc.net > tel +44 117 929 1316 fax +44 117 927 2015 > > > Actually, gone missing has been in common usage in my home area for the past 20 years at least. My home area being southwestern Arkansas. This may be the reason that it has shown up on the news broadcasts for the Texas fugitives. Maybe it has already been in use in this small, little part of the country for awhile. Bryan Green
Re: Anglo-American communications studies
On Mon, 8 Jan 2001, David Honig wrote: >At 08:17 AM 1/8/01 -0500, Ken Brown wrote: >>and there are very few opportunities for real misunderstanding. We know > >The meaning of 'billion' differs by three orders of magnitude >across the pond. That's plenty of room for confusion :-) > And in the US, "billiards" is a game played with cues and balls on a felt-covered slate table. In the UK, it's also a very large number. Thankfully, so large that that definition rarely comes into conversation. As I understand cross-pond conversions, it goes like this USA UK Scientific Thousand Thousand 1E3 Million Million 1E6 Billion Milliard 1E9 Trillion Billion 1E12 Quadrillion Billiard 1E15 Quintillion Trillion 1E18 Sextillion Trilliard 1E21 Septillion Quadrillion 1E24 OctillionQuadrilliard 1E27 etc etc etc This silliness seems regular, and has no good reason not to extend indefinitely. But perversely, both dialects use the same word for googols and larger quantities. This is one reason why I tend to just say "screw it" and go to scientific notation when writing. That way it's clear what I mean no matter where the reader is from. Bear
Re: Anglo-American communications studies
>>>and there are very few opportunities for real misunderstanding. > >So Ken if you read that Blair was near Thatcher's house and knocked >her up, Yanks would think something very different from Brits. > That's where technology can help : catch it on video.
Re: Anglo-American communications studies
>>and there are very few opportunities for real misunderstanding. So Ken if you read that Blair was near Thatcher's house and knocked her up, Yanks would think something very different from Brits.
Re: Anglo-American communications studies
At 08:17 AM 1/8/01 -0500, Ken Brown wrote: >and there are very few opportunities for real misunderstanding. We know The meaning of 'billion' differs by three orders of magnitude across the pond. That's plenty of room for confusion :-)
Re: Anglo-American communications studies
[Apologies for continuing this odd thread but ...] On Mon, 8 Jan 2001, Tim May wrote: > >Anyway - I heard Americans on the TV last week talking about "railway" > >instead of "railroad". And "station" instead of "depot" (though Grand > >Central Station is I suppose quite old, so you must have had that one > >for a while) > > The most interesting Britishism to suddenly invade our shores and > spread rapidly is "gone missing." I'm now hearing this in American > movies, t.v. shows, and, importantly, television news. "The hunt is > on for the fugitives in Texas who have gone missing." This is > definitely new to our shores; I'm surprised (and pleased) at how > rapidly it has spread. > > "At university" and "at hospital" have not become common (though "at The more common British term is "in hospital". I don't recall ever hearing anyone say "at hospital". There are innumerable small distinctions in usage . If you are in hospital, you are ill, not a member of the staff. Your being ill may the result of an injury. That is, the same term covers both sicknesses and injuries. If you are in hospital because of a broken back, people will say that you are ill. If you are sick, on the other hand, it means that you have vomited. > college" and "at school" are fully equivalent and are common). They aren't equivalent at all. In the UK [young] children go to "school" and "college" generally refers to something very roughly equivalent to either an American senior high school or junior college. My company has university students spending a year or so with us on placement; if you ask them when they are going back to school, they tend to be offended, thinking you are poking fun at them. Taking the mickey, that is. -- Jim Dixon VBCnet GB Ltd http://www.vbc.net tel +44 117 929 1316 fax +44 117 927 2015
Re: Anglo-American communications studies
At 8:17 AM -0500 1/8/01, Ken Brown wrote: > >Anyway - I heard Americans on the TV last week talking about "railway" >instead of "railroad". And "station" instead of "depot" (though Grand >Central Station is I suppose quite old, so you must have had that one >for a while) The most interesting Britishism to suddenly invade our shores and spread rapidly is "gone missing." I'm now hearing this in American movies, t.v. shows, and, importantly, television news. "The hunt is on for the fugitives in Texas who have gone missing." This is definitely new to our shores; I'm surprised (and pleased) at how rapidly it has spread. "At university" and "at hospital" have not become common (though "at college" and "at school" are fully equivalent and are common). > >As you said: > >> Fact is, both dialects of English have longer versions of the same >> basic word than other dialects have. >> Which is preferable is a matter of taste and familiarity. > >and there are very few opportunities for real misunderstanding. We know >"Randy" is a name in the US, even if we snigger when we hear it, and any >American spending more than 5 minutes in Britain UK would find out that >a "fag" is a cigarette, so no harm done. You must be a bum. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED]Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
Re: Anglo-American communications studies
Tim May wrote: > > I'm now 49, and "car" has been much more common in these United > States than "automobile" has been, in my lifetime. > > Further, I often hear Britishisms which are far longer and more > labored than the American equivalents. For example: > > "articulated lorry" vs. "semi" > > "redundant" vs. "laid-off" > > "Mackintosh" vs. "raincoat" "redundant" which has a technical legal meaning that is different from "laid-off" (which we also use). "artic" & "mac" are both normal (though the second now old-fashioned - who wears raincoats any more anyway?) > "Pantechnicon" = "moving van" > > (I only learned this last one on a site devoted to Britishisms vs. > Americanisms.) Don't believe all you read on the web :-) I wouldn't have known "pantechnicon" was a van if you'd asked me. And we used to think you didn't have the word "van" - we thought you always said "truck" or "pick-up". (Though when I went to Texas my colleagues seemed to use the word "van" to include passenger vehicles - the large car/small bus sort of thing that gets sold as a "people mover" over here. For us a "van" is for carrying things more than people, though plenty of drivers use them as cars) Anyway - I heard Americans on the TV last week talking about "railway" instead of "railroad". And "station" instead of "depot" (though Grand Central Station is I suppose quite old, so you must have had that one for a while) As you said: > Fact is, both dialects of English have longer versions of the same > basic word than other dialects have. > Which is preferable is a matter of taste and familiarity. and there are very few opportunities for real misunderstanding. We know "Randy" is a name in the US, even if we snigger when we hear it, and any American spending more than 5 minutes in Britain UK would find out that a "fag" is a cigarette, so no harm done. If there is any chance of confusion it is in the connotations of speech rather than the denotations. "Homely" has the same literal meaning (home-like, reminiscent of home) on both sides of the Atlantic but in Britain it is emotionally slightly positive (Tolkien's "Last Homely House") & in the US very negative, mostly used as a euphemism for "ugly". The same applies ot tone of voice.Brits (& Australians) seem mostly less sensitive to insult than Americans but more to sarcasm & irony. So we can sometimes be rude to you & you don't notice - and we can be friendly and you think we are being rude. And presumably it works the other way round as well. The society that invented the breakfast meeting must have developed many exquisite verbal tortures that us plainspeaking Brits miss out on. Ken
Re: Anglo-American communications studies
Harmon Seaver wrote: > Amazing what passes for cryptic comments these days. Maybe it *is* crypto? The email equivalent of a numbers station. Who knows whether or not: " Please remove "Shanah Tovah" item which appears after doing a search of my name Cheryl Gilan." is in fact a cryptic message to release an ETA bomb squad somewhere in Spain? David Honig wrote: > So what do you call the artifacts that warm your homes, and where > are they located? Boilers and radiators? Embedded wires? Fireplaces? > Peat fires? Mad-cow-dung fires? Boilers. No-one I know uses hot air to heat a domestic house though you do get it in some large commercial buildings. These days they are smaller, and sit on the wall, often in a cupboard. They no longer store water, just heat it up on the way through. I should think that 99% of all new houses and flats use that sort. Mine is in a sort of broom-cupboard beside the toilet. Older ones tend to be largish lagged things, often in the attic (i.e. space below the roof). John Young wrote: > In New York City, there is an important distinction between > cellar and basement. Cellars are not habitable while > basements are. The building code definition of a basement > is that at least half its height is above street level, and that > of cellar is that just over half its height is below street > level. Many residential buildings are designed to > take advantage of that distinction. The rule covers > sloping site conditions to average the difference between > front and back. 500 years ago "cellar" didn't necessarily imply underground at all. When brick came into general use in domestic houses it enabled the building of cheap chimneys, which enabled the older "hall" houses to be divided by a floor into an upstairs and a downstairs. In many medium-sized houses the family moved upstairs (in larger ones they were already there at one end of the hall in the "solar") leaving the business (kitchen, goods, servants, animals) below. Some houses used brick or stone to reinforce the floor, erecting pillars to support it & that became a "cellar" whether or not it was below street level. Chimneys, ceilings, furniture, printing & Protestantism all became common in England in one generation sometime in the late 15th or early 16th century. OK, the Protestantism was a little later. Harmon Seaver wrote: > In different areas of the US we have different tems for the thing get water > out of at the sink. In the south it's often called spigot, and in the north > faucet. Also tap. What do you Brits call that? Tap. We find the word "faucet" funny, it sounds as if it should be slightly obscene, a good example of the US habit of never using a short word when a long one will do. But when I found myself amongst Americans I was slightly disappointed to find that they almost all say "tap" these days. Just as they say "car" instead of "automobile". You are obviously all watching too much British TV, or listening to too many British rock bands. You should defend your language against this tide of old-world vulgarity. Ken Brown
RE: Anglo-American communications studies
At 01:08 PM 1/4/01 -0500, Trei, Peter wrote: >2. The 'storage heater'. The CEGB (central electricity >generating board) rates were far lower at night >than during the day or evening. Interestingly, this time-dependency has also forced other technology. Some years ago, the fuzzy logic people were touting a (german?) dishwasher which was extra quiet because it used their tech... which is important because Europeans apparently do their heavy-wattage usage at night, to save costs. A foreign concept to Yanks :-) Your electric meters must cost more. I once lived in UC grad housing that had no electric bill (free electricity :-) because it would have cost too much to install individual meters.
Re: Anglo-American communications studies
Craig McKie wrote: > > Americans do not have electric kettles within the intended British > meaning. They tend not to know what you are talking about. The product > is absent from the shelves at Target and Walmart. > Really? I bought my electric kettle at Target, although I bought my son's at a fancy cookware shop called Wire Wisk at the mall. I use mine for tea, he uses his to boil water for both coffee and tea. > Most Canadian households would have electric kettles where gas cooking > is not involved. Something about tea-making perhaps? > > O>>I think "furnace" is "boiler" in English. No, furnace is furnace, boiler is boiler. > > Bear wrote: > >Hm. Not all furnaces are boilers. Basically we use the word > >"furnace" here to mean the heating unit for a house. One kind > >of furnace is a boiler, which heats liquid that then gets > >circulated through radiators. > > No, that's a mis-use of the word furnace. Furnaces produce hot forced air heat. Boilers are boilers, either steam or hot water. > >Other types of furnaces are electrical, or fired by gas, coal, > >oil, or wood. Sometimes they heat a gigantic rock that then > >radiates heat for days (this arrangement is popular in arid > >northern and northwestern states). More often they heat air, > >channeled through a heat-exchanger by a fan and then circulated > >directly through the rest of the house via ductwork. > > > >Actual boiler-type furnaces are quite rare in the US, and > >I haven't seen a coal-fired furnace since I was a child. > >They're still out there, though; although they are now illegal > >for pollution reasons here in CA, there are places in the > >midwest where once in a while you still find them in use. > > > > Good grief -- "boiler-type furnaces are quite rare in the US", eh? You ought to come up north sometimes. Hot water or steam boilers are extremely common in homes. I wouldn't have anything else -- in fact, a house with forced air heat wouldn't even be looked at by my wife or I for potential purchase, they give really lousy,drafty performace which dries out your skin and shrivels house plants and generally makes you miserable all Winter. Hydronic heating is the only way to go. Not only is it better heat, but it also lends itself more readily to heat storage if you have a combo wood and gas/oil boiler, where you use a large insulated tank to even out the heat from the higher temp wood fires. With a wood furnace, the wood burns up, the house gets overly hot, then the fire goes out and you're cold. Amazing what passes for cryptic comments these days. -- Harmon Seaver, MLIS Systems Librarian Arrowhead Library SystemVirginia, MN (218) 741-3840 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://harmon.arrowhead.lib.mn.us
RE: Anglo-American communications studies
Central heating did not develop until well after the US and Britain split. There was little technology transfer, so it's not too suprising that the terminology is different. When I moved to Britain in the late 60's, central heating was still rare enough that it was noted in real estate listings. The Brits and other Europeans developed some rather odd devices to retrofit older houses 1. The Geyser (alt pro: geezer). A box attached to the wall in or near a shower, which provided instant hot water. Some were gas powered (in which case a balanced flue was fitted through a hole in the wall to the outside). Some were electric. Having several hundred watts of electricity in intimate contact with the water and metal piping of the shower was rather nervous making (saw many still in use in Scotland this summer). 2. The 'storage heater'. The CEGB (central electricity generating board) rates were far lower at night than during the day or evening. A storage heater was a metal box, typically 4' wide, 2.5 ft high, and about a foot deep, filled with electric elements and firebrick. During the night, the bricks would be heated electrically. By morning the box was a serious burn hazard, and radiating heat for the rest of the day as it slowly cooled. At my boarding school, we used to toss matches on the top of one and make bets as to which would be the first to light. Peter Trei
