S. Worthen | Weblog

Dear People raised in the UK or Canada, and other people who like filling out polls:
[Poll #1679508]

Languages are challenging, not least because they keep changing. "an historian" and "an historical figure" were some of the British grammatical quirks I got down early.

Only now, the internet tells me, times, they are a changin'. It's okay to use "a" instead of "an" for histor* words in British Englishes. I would like some more evidence on the subject one way or the other.

I love going to the grocery store when I'm visiting somewhere else. It's full of the alien and the familiar, products I hadn't realized were stocked in this region or country, new brands, and new products. In this case, the grocery store I grew up with has been completely rebuilt. Not just remodeled - it's a whole new, much larger building. It was still part-construction site the last time I was in Des Moines. Now it's finished.

The dried fruit selection is impressive. I've never seen baby coconuts for sale before, let alone know what one would do with them. What a lovely selection of salsas! I'm luck to have a choice of two or three at the average English grocery store. The ground meat selection is superior too, with ground beef coming from a whole variety of specific cuts. Smoked pork chops sounded appealing.

Relatedly, I'm indulging in lots of "real" apple cider and am looking forward to store-bought egg nog, both favorites, and neither of which I've ever found in the UK. (I like home-made egg nog too, but it's as different from the store-bought as mac and cheese is from Kraft dinner.)

The real moment of being back here, though, was when the grocery loader was loading our bags of groceries into the back of the car, after we'd paid and gone back out into the snow. This is a store which will wheel your cart of groceries out to the loading zone and, matching number slip to cart, load them all up for you. We had a wonderfully friendly loader, social without being overbearing in the least, a little sore from yesterday's snowboarding and rueing the irony which led to weak-muscled staff assigned to car-loading duties. (The better for building up her muscles, clearly.)

The UK has all sorts of grocery delivery services, but I've never seen car-loading done at supermarkets there.

On the train ride back from grading tonight, I made good inroads into Ben Goldacre's Bad Science. I was really enjoying it until I completely stumbled over a sentence that began "Throughout history".* Then, secure in an instance of shoddy history, I felt gullible. It's a book about reading critically, and that one phrase made me realize I'd been reading it uncritically. The rest of it may be entirely sound, but I'd fallen right into the collegial teacher-student relationship implied in its friendly, easy-to-read didacticism, and, being entertained, feel I failed to think.

On the bright side, I felt entirely tuned in yesterday when an insult delighted me. Two teenagers, passed me on the street in bright sunlight when, just past, one muttered, "Ginger nut". And I got it. I knew what it meant! I knew that it was meant to be an insult, and I not only knew that, but I was paying enough attention to hear it in the first place! I was proud of my cultural indoctrination, having been raised without this apparently frequent English baggage. Rarely are insults so pleasing.

* p. 64 "Throughout history, the placebo effect has been particularly well documented in the field of pain, and some of the stories are striking."

austengirl reminds me that any lexicon of English Christmas needs to include "baubles" - the subclass of ornaments comprised of shiny spheres.

My middle America weather report of the past twenty-four hours comes from two places:
A wonderfully-concerned person from whom I'd mail-ordered some nuts and was desperately hoping they could be delivered somewhere where she could be sure they wouldn't be left out in the cold. - " When it gets terrible cold, we want to be sure the nuts don't freeze."
And from my American employers, who postponed final exams on Monday night/Tuesday morning to Wednesday. I feel so sorry for those having to grade those delayed exams, as grades are still due Thursday at noon.

From A Diamond in Sunlight, a story from when we were younger.

New English words I learned this week, thanks to a misunderstanding at the local garden centre:

tinsel (UK) = garland (US)
lametta (UK) or angel hair (UK) = tinsel (US) or icicles (US)

Edited to add: "lametta" and "icicles" to post to make it more useful.

Two phrases I finally have down, although the first one requires active visualization to be sure I have it correctly for any given use now:

"the inside lane" - This always meant the lane furthest from the sidewalk or nearest to the median to me. A trawl of a few US sites mostly backs me up on this. This is the exact opposite of what it means in the UK. Here, in the UK, it refers to the slow lane the lane furthest from the median. So confusing! So dangerous to be able to confuse the two!

"What am I like." - Not actually a question, but a rhetorical phrase after doing something silly or flighty or accidental. Can also be used in the second person, i.e. "What are you like." I don't yet know if it can be used for any persons. First encountered twice on Sunday in Britannia High, followed up tonight, coincidentally, by the first instance I've noticed C. using it.

If you haven't already guessed what color Peppermint Beach is (and haven't already looked it up), do that first. The post to respond to is here.

( Peppermint Beach... )

Vacuum cleaners are dangerous. I am struck that the BBC did used "vacuum cleaner", not "hoover", and indeed, I feel as if I very rarely hear anyone using "hoover". Is it more common as verb than noun these days?

It took an Irishwoman and an Australian to teach me some American earlier this week.

All my life, I thought that "roommate" mean "someone with whom one shares a room". I had a roommate at Smith. We shared a room. Some people on campus had suitemates; they shared a hallway and a door to the main hallway. Lots of other people lived in my house on campus; they were my housemates.

Yet apparently, in American, a "roommate" is someone with whom one shares a residence, whether room, suite, apartment, flat, or house. By these standards, I had 50+ "roommates" as an undergraduate. How very confusing! How on earth do Americans distinguish room-sharing, from sharing any other scale of accomodation?

Where in the UK does one go to buy large trash-bag-sized clear plastic bags? B&Q, Homebase, and Sainsbury's do not sell them. They only sell black or green opaque ones.

I really don't have to have them, but it's become a personal challenge. In Canada and the US, I bought them at Home Depot or Canadian Tire, cheaply, in large rolls. Here, I can't find them at all so far. (They're useful for storage of non-trash goods on a temporary basis. Good, therefore, for the casual moving of soft goods.)

Edited to add: Lakeland and Robert Dyas didn't have them either, but Waitrose came through for me! 2.99 for a pack of 10 transparent draw-string bags sold as "Storage Bags". nicolai also offered some good, if more expensive, alternatives, should any of you in the UK ever be truly desperate for such things.