@Gramps49 I loved watching the videos you linked to! (Never used the words scallion or spring onion. They were always called stinkers in our house, or green onions!)
It was this prestigious website where I first read the term "ass hat". Surprisingly, Daughter-Unit had heard the term long before I did. I had assumed (and am willing to be told otherwise) that this term came from the eastern side of the Pond.
@Orfeo, yes you're right, I didn't mention the Scandinavian influence.
I thought about that last night when catching up with a Norwegian 'Scandi-noir' crime drama on BBC i-Player.
One of the characters used a word for playing that sounded like 'lecking' - similar to the Yorkshire dialect word 'laiking' which was still current when I lived up there during the '80s.
There are still some Danish and other Norse words in northern English dialects as well as within standard English more broadly.
You are right. I should have included the Danish element.
Coming back to US English, it doesn't surprise me when CK tells us that there were terms that would generally be considered Americanisms in her native Dorset.
Nor would it surprise me if the Devonshire 'ass' noted from 1672 had been pronounced more like 'arse' with a long 'a' sound than the way 'ass' is pronounced in contemporary UK English - north and south - with a short 'a'.
Back in Chaucer's time I suspect 'arse' had a very strong 'r', more like the rolling Scottish r. 'Arrse.'
This would probably still been quite prominent in Elizabethan times but I suspect had softened by the late 1600s.
It would be interesting to trace when 'arse' became 'ass' in The New World (as it were).
I've heard it said that the speech of the Colonists in 1776 wouldn't have been that different from the English spoken in the British isles. Those with Scottish or Irish heritage would still have sounded like their cousins back across the Atlantic. Those with English heritage would have retained a broadly English way of speaking, although I suspect some variations must have begun to develop from the mid-1600s onwards. Heck, despite the thread's title, although we may be two nations divided by a common language, it's not as if we are mutually unintelligible even now.
@Gramps49 I can answer your question about why 'aubergine' comes from French, though I can't answer the one that accompanies it, as to why anyone should call a purple vegetable an 'egg plant'.
Aubergines don't really grow here. We're slightly too far north. Until about 50 years ago, you didn't see them in the markets. I'd never seen one until I travelled in southern Europe in the mid-sixties. People first met them on holiday on the continent and decided they'd like to have them at home. I suppose they could have chosen whatever is the Spanish or Italian for them but France is the nearest country they could come from. Besides, French is proud of its gastronomic reputation and fashionable for it. So if you're looking for a foreign word to give to something that you might want to encourage people to think of as a delicacy and worth paying for, there's always been a tendency to choose what the French call it. Likewise, I suppose 'courgette', though that's odder as they're little marrows which is a vegetable that has always been grown here.
But why 'egg plant'. I share the puzzlement of the millennials in the youtubes.
I was slightly intrigued about 'scallions' for spring onions as I thought that was an Irish expression for them.
On the Danish influence on English, I was told once that this was an important reason why English verbs don't change their endings as much as, say, French or German ones do. Apparently, or so it was alleged, often the root words in Anglo-Saxon and Viking were the same but the endings were different. People found they could still understand each other if they spoke in a slovenly way and dropped the endings. So this became a habit.
The OED says that the name was first given to the white variety, then became attached to the purple. First known use in print, a gardening book from 1767.
Wikipedia has a very interesting article on this fruit (actually a berry). Goes into detail about the origin of the names. "Aubergines" not actually French but a derivative of the Arabic bāḏinjān (Arabic: باذنجان). The article also shows some examples of white eggplant.
"Meet" and "meet with" have different meanings, or can. I can meet you at the coffee shop -- we bump into each other accidentally. Or I can meet with you -- we sit down and go over business together.
And then there’s “meet up,” as in “Let’s meet up at the coffee shop,” meaning we’ll get together at the coffee shop to then go wherever else we’re going.
"Meet" and "meet with" have different meanings, or can. I can meet you at the coffee shop -- we bump into each other accidentally. Or I can meet with you -- we sit down and go over business together.
And then there’s “meet up,” as in “Let’s meet up at the coffee shop,” meaning we’ll get together at the coffee shop to then go wherever else we’re going.
Yes -- to all three meanings.
There's also another meaning, as when something meets the criteria, for instance.
Then there's the noun, as in track meet or Shipmeet!
A courgette is a zucchini to us. Eggplants get called brinjal, but seldom aubergine in my hearing.
We eat beets. They're not called "beet root". The tops are "beet greens" and the varieties which are grown for the leaves are called "swiss chard"/
Turnips are called turnips. The terms rutabaga and swede are not used. I learned that these are all varieties of the same thing only within the past decade.
Sweet potatoes and yams are different plants.
john holdingEcclesiantics Host, Mystery Worshipper Host
Turnips are called turnips. The terms rutabaga and swede are not used.
In Saskatoon.
In part this may be because until recent decades only rutabagas/swedes were known on the prairies (where I grew up), and turnips (the white ones) didn't exist, so far as we knew. But times have changed in most of Canada, and the world has moved on. Certainly in this part of Ontario, white turnips and yellow swedes/rutabagas are labelled and marketted thus.
Here, the red root vegetable is a 'beetroot' and the leaves are 'beetroot leaves'. I grumble about shops that sell beetroot with the leaves cut off as they are very tasty. 'Swiss chard' is a different vegetable here. It has red stalks though. 'Beet' used on its own is more likely to refer to sugar beet, which is inedible as a vegetable but widely grown for conversion into sugar. Turnips and swedes are similar root vegetables but different. The word 'rutabaga' is unknown. Swedes are neeps in Scotland.
A root vegetable I've got very fond of which wasn't much eaten until quite recently is celeriac. That's slightly odd, as I regard celery as a complete waste of time as a vegetable.
Another relatively recent - to me that is - culinary development is encountering beetroot used in cakes in much the way carrots are. As they're quite sweet, I think that works rather well.
Swiss chard comes with red, yellow or white stems, having bought packs with all three included. Most recently all my veggie box Swiss Chard has been white stemmed.
That's slightly odd, as I regard celery as a complete waste of time as a vegetable.
[tanget alert]
This reminds me of the time that my wife first tried to put celery in the tuna salad spread she had made for sandwiches. I had grown up with dill pickles in the spread, but not celery. This was about two months into our marriage. We knew the honeymoon was over then.
Now, after 43 years of marriage, I don't mind it as much.
A courgette is a zucchini to us. Eggplants get called brinjal, but seldom aubergine in my hearing.
We eat beets. They're not called "beet root". The tops are "beet greens" and the varieties which are grown for the leaves are called "swiss chard"/
Turnips are called turnips. The terms rutabaga and swede are not used. I learned that these are all varieties of the same thing only within the past decade.
Sweet potatoes and yams are different plants.
. Turnips are turnips and swedes are swedes. Zucchini and eggplant are called just that. None of this courgette and aubergine business. Mot beet root, but beetroot, the one word. Things get difficult with green leaves. There is spinach (really a variety of chard) and english spinach (the European variety). - and lots of other leaves these days brought by more recent arrivals, giving a variety our grandparents did not think existed.
Around here, Swede doesn’t mean anything other than a person from Sweden.
Ditto. And Zucchinis are only courgettes in British books and news outlets; same for eggplants and "aubergines". And I had never heard the name "brinjal." Swiss chard and beet greens are two different plants. Both tasty.
There's an old saw about how northerners eat the beets (roots) and throw the greens away, while southerners eat the greens and feed the beets (roots) to the pigs.
Something completely different. How on earth did we end up with a kerb on one side of the Atlantic and a curb on the other? (A lot of stores are offering curbside delivery around here at the moment).
Something completely different. How on earth did we end up with a kerb on one side of the Atlantic and a curb on the other? (A lot of stores are offering curbside delivery around here at the moment).
In Britain does one kerb one's appetite or curb one's appetite?
@mousethief we curb our appetites, and use curb as a verb. I'm in the UK.
Kerb is the side of the road, usually paved, giving kerbside deliveries. Locally there are various roads without kerbs that aren't a lot of fun to walk, but the footpaths across the fields don't connect without some walking some sections of road.
Apparently 'curb' is the older form, and both senses have the same ultimate origin (presumably because they both involve a border on things). For some reason 'kerb' took hold as a variant.
I'd use curb as a verb. It is also a noun - his actions were a curb on mob violence. I've only ever seen kerb as a noun to describe the side of a road (although from memory in the US it can also be used to mean the footpath/sidewalk).
(although from memory in the US it can also be used to mean the footpath/sidewalk).
Having lived in the U.S. my entire life, in different parts of the country, I've only heard it used to describe the edging of the road, usually made of concrete. If there is a sidewalk, the curb separates it from the street.
"Curb" does exist in American English in the sense "curb your dog" or "The Law of God is a curb on the sinful nature..." etc. (Luther's Small Catechism)
Often times, on what we call blue highways (not primary roads in the US) we will see signs saying "No Curbs," meaning other than maybe an unpaved strip along the highway, there is nothing to keep the car on the straight and narrow as it were. The next worse warning is "No shoulders ahead," meaning that unpaved strip is not even there.
Oh road signage can be quite interesting. One of my favourites is "Soft Verges" which can bring to mind all manner of things. I also like "Slow Children Crossing" which can be taken several ways.
Ha! That brings back a childhood memory - whenever we passed a ‘heavy plant crossing’ sign, my dear old dad would say, ‘It’s the giant cabbages again’.
It might have been mildly amusing once, when I was, well, about 6.
Years ago, while traveling in England, we drove past a sign that said "Boot Sale." There seemed to be an awful lots of people there just to buy boots. Then the light dawned...
A butcher's shop near me had a sign in the window' beef mince, lamb mince, pet mince'. I was tempted to go in and ask what sort of pets they had minced up.
A friend once saw a sign in a market in Yorkshire which said 'Dutch Caps'.
It was short for 'capsicums' of course, a term you don't hear much these days, as 'red peppers' or 'green papers' or 'yellow peppers' seem to have become the norm. This was over 30 years ago.
Thanks to the BBC's Country File, I know now that there are vast greenhouses (glasshouses) in the Leigh Valley, London's green lung, growing these things for us but we still import many from Holland to meet demand.
For the uninitiated, in UK English a Dutch Cap is a barrier form of contraception.
Or Lea Valley, as the river is called both. (As someone to the east of the Lea Valley and who's walked it from Ware to the Thames). There's a view point in Epping Forest that looks down over sheets of glass in the valley below near Enfield but there are growing areas up to Nazeing. I worked with a Scicilian boy with learning needs whose father was employed somewhere in those glasshouses.
Leigh, pronounced Lie is also a village in Kent. It has a stoolball team. There is also Leigh-on-Sea in Essex.
Driving up the Lea Valley, I had the impression that a lot of the market gardens were owned by Italians.
Comments
It was this prestigious website where I first read the term "ass hat". Surprisingly, Daughter-Unit had heard the term long before I did. I had assumed (and am willing to be told otherwise) that this term came from the eastern side of the Pond.
This was because I have never worked out why it was as funny as it was.
*90s Irish situation comedy, m'lud.
I thought about that last night when catching up with a Norwegian 'Scandi-noir' crime drama on BBC i-Player.
One of the characters used a word for playing that sounded like 'lecking' - similar to the Yorkshire dialect word 'laiking' which was still current when I lived up there during the '80s.
There are still some Danish and other Norse words in northern English dialects as well as within standard English more broadly.
You are right. I should have included the Danish element.
Coming back to US English, it doesn't surprise me when CK tells us that there were terms that would generally be considered Americanisms in her native Dorset.
Nor would it surprise me if the Devonshire 'ass' noted from 1672 had been pronounced more like 'arse' with a long 'a' sound than the way 'ass' is pronounced in contemporary UK English - north and south - with a short 'a'.
Back in Chaucer's time I suspect 'arse' had a very strong 'r', more like the rolling Scottish r. 'Arrse.'
This would probably still been quite prominent in Elizabethan times but I suspect had softened by the late 1600s.
It would be interesting to trace when 'arse' became 'ass' in The New World (as it were).
I've heard it said that the speech of the Colonists in 1776 wouldn't have been that different from the English spoken in the British isles. Those with Scottish or Irish heritage would still have sounded like their cousins back across the Atlantic. Those with English heritage would have retained a broadly English way of speaking, although I suspect some variations must have begun to develop from the mid-1600s onwards. Heck, despite the thread's title, although we may be two nations divided by a common language, it's not as if we are mutually unintelligible even now.
Aubergines don't really grow here. We're slightly too far north. Until about 50 years ago, you didn't see them in the markets. I'd never seen one until I travelled in southern Europe in the mid-sixties. People first met them on holiday on the continent and decided they'd like to have them at home. I suppose they could have chosen whatever is the Spanish or Italian for them but France is the nearest country they could come from. Besides, French is proud of its gastronomic reputation and fashionable for it. So if you're looking for a foreign word to give to something that you might want to encourage people to think of as a delicacy and worth paying for, there's always been a tendency to choose what the French call it. Likewise, I suppose 'courgette', though that's odder as they're little marrows which is a vegetable that has always been grown here.
But why 'egg plant'. I share the puzzlement of the millennials in the youtubes.
I was slightly intrigued about 'scallions' for spring onions as I thought that was an Irish expression for them.
On the Danish influence on English, I was told once that this was an important reason why English verbs don't change their endings as much as, say, French or German ones do. Apparently, or so it was alleged, often the root words in Anglo-Saxon and Viking were the same but the endings were different. People found they could still understand each other if they spoke in a slovenly way and dropped the endings. So this became a habit.
I've no idea if this is true.
Yes -- to all three meanings.
There's also another meaning, as when something meets the criteria, for instance.
Then there's the noun, as in track meet or Shipmeet!
We eat beets. They're not called "beet root". The tops are "beet greens" and the varieties which are grown for the leaves are called "swiss chard"/
Turnips are called turnips. The terms rutabaga and swede are not used. I learned that these are all varieties of the same thing only within the past decade.
Sweet potatoes and yams are different plants.
In Saskatoon.
In part this may be because until recent decades only rutabagas/swedes were known on the prairies (where I grew up), and turnips (the white ones) didn't exist, so far as we knew. But times have changed in most of Canada, and the world has moved on. Certainly in this part of Ontario, white turnips and yellow swedes/rutabagas are labelled and marketted thus.
A root vegetable I've got very fond of which wasn't much eaten until quite recently is celeriac. That's slightly odd, as I regard celery as a complete waste of time as a vegetable.
Another relatively recent - to me that is - culinary development is encountering beetroot used in cakes in much the way carrots are. As they're quite sweet, I think that works rather well.
[tanget alert]
This reminds me of the time that my wife first tried to put celery in the tuna salad spread she had made for sandwiches. I had grown up with dill pickles in the spread, but not celery. This was about two months into our marriage. We knew the honeymoon was over then.
Now, after 43 years of marriage, I don't mind it as much.
{/tangent]
Though I should acknowledge celery’s role (with onion and bell pepper) as part of the Holy Trinity of Louisiana Cajun and Creole cooking.
Ditto. And Zucchinis are only courgettes in British books and news outlets; same for eggplants and "aubergines". And I had never heard the name "brinjal." Swiss chard and beet greens are two different plants. Both tasty.
There's an old saw about how northerners eat the beets (roots) and throw the greens away, while southerners eat the greens and feed the beets (roots) to the pigs.
Oh yes! A lovely thing. (guess how we cook, much of the time?)
In Britain does one kerb one's appetite or curb one's appetite?
A sentence worthy of inclusion in a phrasebook for travellers.
Kerb is the side of the road, usually paved, giving kerbside deliveries. Locally there are various roads without kerbs that aren't a lot of fun to walk, but the footpaths across the fields don't connect without some walking some sections of road.
It might have been mildly amusing once, when I was, well, about 6.
MMM
You must live near me. I pass this every day on the way home from work.
This was because I
That wouldn't work here. We know what sod is, if we think about it, but we'd call it turf when sold for, e.g., laying a lawn.
It was short for 'capsicums' of course, a term you don't hear much these days, as 'red peppers' or 'green papers' or 'yellow peppers' seem to have become the norm. This was over 30 years ago.
Thanks to the BBC's Country File, I know now that there are vast greenhouses (glasshouses) in the Leigh Valley, London's green lung, growing these things for us but we still import many from Holland to meet demand.
For the uninitiated, in UK English a Dutch Cap is a barrier form of contraception.
Driving up the Lea Valley, I had the impression that a lot of the market gardens were owned by Italians.