Americanisms are uniquely American thoughts, beliefs, or actions
March 17, 2021 8:52 PM   Subscribe

The MIT International Students Office offers a guide to cultural adjustment. Besides for a breakdown of the phases of cultural adjustment, it also offers extensive primers on Americanisms and idioms. The contents may be of interest to Americans as well. posted by cosmic owl (315 comments total) 77 users marked this as a favorite
 
Tell you what, there's one idiomatic meaning to 'pitching' I discovered the wrong way talking to some Americans. Uhhh.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 9:09 PM on March 17, 2021 [20 favorites]


Also, Americans really value their time (which is tied to their privacy and independence). They are so polite that they don’t want to say “I don’t have time to meet up!” They would rather say, “Sure!” and then not follow up.

Turns out this has nothing to do with crippling social anxiety and awkwardness! I'm just so American!
posted by lock robster at 9:10 PM on March 17, 2021 [69 favorites]


born & raised in Wisconsin & if you said "leaf peeping" to me I'd be like "what did you just say? leaf peeping?" & you'd say "yeah, don't you go leaf peeping?" & I'd be like "what is that" & you'd be like "going out to look at the fall leaves?" & I'd be like "ohhhh I have never heard that called 'leaf peeping' in my entire life but yes let's do that and let's get caramel apples"
posted by taquito sunrise at 9:18 PM on March 17, 2021 [32 favorites]




The pitch dark definition should definitely say it's because "pitch" is also a very dark, tarry substance (now I realize I don't know what it's made from?) used to waterproof things. (I think?)
posted by emjaybee at 9:22 PM on March 17, 2021 [10 favorites]


it's been >10 years and i'm STILL not over having to use 'backstop' in work narrative.
posted by cendawanita at 9:25 PM on March 17, 2021 [1 favorite]


They would rather say, “Sure!” and then not follow up.

also this. >:(
posted by cendawanita at 9:26 PM on March 17, 2021 [1 favorite]


The pitch dark definition should definitely say it's because "pitch" is also a very dark, tarry substance

But "pitching a tent" (in either sense) has nothing to do with waterproofing, although for one sense you'd want to do it before dark and the other one after dark...
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:27 PM on March 17, 2021 [6 favorites]


I assumed 'backstop' wasn't an Americanism because the term has been used so liberally in Brexit negotiations (as in "the Irish backstop"). Or was it borrowed from the American usage?
posted by theory at 9:32 PM on March 17, 2021


I'm reminded of a discussion that was going sideways until it became clear that the Americans knew that "length" has a lewd connotation and the non-American didn't.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 9:37 PM on March 17, 2021 [3 favorites]


Wait, I'm sorry, me telling people they're free to reach out to me instead of saying "contact me" is a result of an AT&T commercial in the 70s!?
posted by meese at 9:40 PM on March 17, 2021 [8 favorites]


Or was it borrowed from the American usage?

i'm re-googling this because i remembered having a slight argument with my country manager because i couldn't believe it's an actual word (young new-to-the-career-track me was wondering, why not just 'support'?), and it seems to be an americanism because it came from baseball. in any case, it wouldn't be surprising that it made it to international diplomacy because i encountered it in an adjacent sector.
posted by cendawanita at 9:42 PM on March 17, 2021 [2 favorites]


I've never heard 'backstop' ever (despite being USian and also working for corporate), and I feel like I dodged a bullet. Reach out is bad enough.

This looks like documentation built around user confusion (aka the good kind), but I would include something about how many euphemisms Americans have to avoid saying a person died. They passed away, kicked the bucket, bought the farm, went to the big x in the sky, etc.

... is small talk really a uniquely American thing, or is it just the degree / amount required? Also, does this behavior/expectation predate Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People?
posted by snerson at 9:56 PM on March 17, 2021 [1 favorite]


The "dime" thing is wild. Never noticed that in 35 years of being around em. I would be bewildered going to another country that did the same.
posted by supercres at 9:58 PM on March 17, 2021 [33 favorites]


In my head while reading these is the baritone voice of a guy who narrated 1950s/60s educational or travel films.

"But what does eye contact mean in American culture? The answer is–your interest in what the person is saying!"
posted by NorthernLite at 9:59 PM on March 17, 2021 [14 favorites]


That said, can i say just a massive thank you for the US Southern, "don't let me keep you"? It connects so well with our culture here everyone knows exactly that i mean a polite goodbye to the meeting, without explanation.
posted by cendawanita at 10:01 PM on March 17, 2021 [28 favorites]


cendawanita, "I'll let you go now" is my version of that.
posted by NorthernLite at 10:05 PM on March 17, 2021 [18 favorites]


supercres, google "swindler's nickels."
posted by vrakatar at 10:37 PM on March 17, 2021 [3 favorites]


I just realized there's some deep part of my brain that has always lived under the assumption that 'dime' is some semiprecious metal that you never actually see in day-to-day contexts, like nickel. Even though I should know better, having played lots of dwarf fortress, and therefore knowing the name of every kind of metal and alloy ever conceived of.
posted by kaibutsu at 10:47 PM on March 17, 2021 [12 favorites]


MIT, stop trying to make "leaf peeping" happen!
posted by Meatbomb at 11:03 PM on March 17, 2021 [26 favorites]


They define "get down to work". Have you ever heard anyone say "get down to work"? I haven't. There's "get to work" and there's "get down to business" but never the twain shall meet. Is it an east coast thing?
posted by darksasami at 11:04 PM on March 17, 2021 [5 favorites]


... is small talk really a uniquely American thing, or is it just the degree / amount required?

I don't know how unique it is but US public interactions are pretty chatty. In a lot of places, no more communication than what's necessary to complete your transaction is entirely common and not considered rude or unfriendly.
posted by each day we work at 11:08 PM on March 17, 2021 [4 favorites]


I remain in need of a non-gross, non-American way to say "spitballing".
posted by travertina at 11:38 PM on March 17, 2021 [5 favorites]


MIT, stop trying to make "leaf peeping" happen!

"Leaf peeping" is a very common phrase in northern New England. Eg. you hear it on the news every fall when news anchors talk about good weekends for viewing the fall foliage or how busy common leaf peeping tourist areas are. This is definitely not MIT "trying to make [it] happen".
posted by eviemath at 11:39 PM on March 17, 2021 [36 favorites]


I remain in need of a non-gross, non-American way to say "spitballing".

Some other words that could replace "spitballing" in various contexts that I've heard it used:
Guessing
Estimating
Brainstorming
posted by eviemath at 11:42 PM on March 17, 2021 [4 favorites]


I’m still not convinced New England is an actual place.
posted by hototogisu at 11:42 PM on March 17, 2021 [17 favorites]


They define "get down to work". Have you ever heard anyone say "get down to work"? I haven't. There's "get to work" and there's "get down to business" but never the twain shall meet. Is it an east coast thing?

Maybe? I've certainly heard it before, but haven't particularly noticed location or context.
posted by eviemath at 11:43 PM on March 17, 2021


Eeeh, it's been a while, but I feel like 'leaf peepers' is kinda like 'summer people'; disdainful names for seasonal New England tourists and other passers-through? Those who are From Away, but keep the quaint bed & breakfasts / boardwalk frozen custard stands in business.
"Ugh no, the diner will be full of leaf peepers now; wait an hour for 'em all to get back in their tour buses, then we can eat in peace."
posted by bartleby at 12:08 AM on March 18, 2021 [6 favorites]


It's also been a bit for me, so local usage may have changed, but random small town Maine, NH, and Vermont folks absolutely at least used to talk about going leaf peeping themselves, locally. I think there is a difference in connotation between the verb form and the noun form, though.
posted by eviemath at 12:21 AM on March 18, 2021 [3 favorites]


"Backstop" is supposed to be an Americanism? It's what the rounders equivalent of a baseball catcher is called. Its use predates its use in baseball and the baseball usage isn't different.
posted by Dysk at 2:01 AM on March 18, 2021 [2 favorites]


I remain in need of a non-gross, non-American way to say "spitballing".

Thinking out loud?
posted by Dysk at 2:02 AM on March 18, 2021 [5 favorites]


i'm re-googling this because i remembered having a slight argument with my country manager because i couldn't believe it's an actual word (young new-to-the-career-track me was wondering, why not just 'support'?), and it seems to be an americanism because it came from baseball. in any case, it wouldn't be surprising that it made it to international diplomacy because i encountered it in an adjacent sector.

Backstop was a cricket term before it was used in baseball; the earliest reference by the OED is 1819, referring to a (now mostly obsolete) fielding position behind the wicket keeper. It also had other 19th century uses, such as a dirt mound behind a target at a rifle range. So its use in baseball for a barrier behind the catcher (in 1889) likely stems from that existing usage.

Before brexit, I'd heard backstop used as a term for a wall or skirting mounted spring designed to prevent a door going too far back so that the knob damages the wall - with doorstop referring to a wedge that goes under the door. This may be a regionalism though, as all evidence online points to doorstop being used for both.
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 2:08 AM on March 18, 2021 [8 favorites]


cendawanita, "I'll let you go now" is my version of that.

Here in Britain, that means: "You! Let me go! Now!" - but it's a nicer way of staying it. Most people seem to understand this.

There is one American expression that makes no sense whatsoever. I'll let David Mitchell explain.
posted by Paul Slade at 2:13 AM on March 18, 2021 [19 favorites]


If backstop is originally a Britishism this will also delight me because I will now share that factoid with my UK and BrCommonwealth friends and take in their reactions lol. In my part of the Commonwealth that's definitely deprecated. As it is, in my work usage, it's a quick way to figure out if this donor reporting is connected to USAID or not.

But that's fair turnaround, because British/American folks scoff at Indian English (and it's gone global esp in the Commonwealth) usage of 'to revert' for to reply/respond in correspondence when that's a vestige of colonial English that ppl took from legal documents.
posted by cendawanita at 2:22 AM on March 18, 2021 [4 favorites]


There is one American expression that makes no sense whatsoever. I'll let David Mitchell explain

Oh, I disagree. When you say "I couldn't care less" it means you don't care at all. It's impossible to care less about this than I do.

When you say "I could care less" you mean "this is so unimportant to me that I won't even make an effort to care less; I could care less, but why bother."

It's the intonation.
posted by chavenet at 2:50 AM on March 18, 2021 [27 favorites]


Caring less is somehow supposed to be effort? Umm, wut?
posted by Dysk at 2:51 AM on March 18, 2021 [15 favorites]


Sure, you have to put some thought into it.
How much do I care about this? A lot, less than that, zero?
If you're speaking the line you're already putting some effort in!
posted by chavenet at 2:55 AM on March 18, 2021 [3 favorites]


> Wait, I'm sorry, me telling people they're free to reach out to me instead of saying "contact me" is a result of an AT&T commercial in the 70s!?

Arbitrary bits of American idiom is due to marketing, probably more of it than we want to admit. Americans used to say "house" the way English speakers in other countries use "house", but we shifted to "home" because of a marketing push by the primary national real estate agents' association, which has also trademarked the word "realtor".

When I was buying a house, the conversations between our realtor and us sometimes must've sounded like a weird competition, which them repeatedly using "home" and us repeatedly replying with "house".
posted by ardgedee at 3:07 AM on March 18, 2021 [27 favorites]


> Caring less is somehow supposed to be effort? Umm, wut?

It can take effort to ignore some things, right? I swear I'm not trying to play mind games if I say the phrase is not going to reward being thought hard about.
posted by ardgedee at 3:15 AM on March 18, 2021 [2 favorites]


she pointed out that a dime (the smallest coin) only says “One Dime,” with no indication of how many cents it is worth. All of the other coins state how much they are worth in cents.

How did I never notice this before?!?!

cosmic owl, thank you for this post. I can already tell I will be settling in and clicking around this a bunch!
posted by brainwane at 3:19 AM on March 18, 2021 [7 favorites]


Date format in the US arrrrrrgh. It's like Fahrenheit in how unique-in-a-bad-way the US is in its usage. I was born and raised in the US but my parents are from India and I work with a lot of folks across borders, so I've gotten into the habit of always writing out the date with the month name (e.g., "March 9th" or "9 March") just to ensure I avoid the possiblility of an accidental misunderstanding (e.g., "3/9/2013" being read as "September 3rd" versus "March 9th").

And "RSVP" -- today I learned that even the French don't use that phrase anymore!
posted by brainwane at 3:52 AM on March 18, 2021 [15 favorites]


I see this guide also includes explanations of Boston-specific stuff like the Boston Marathon and the August 31st-September 1st moving frenzy that leaves a bunch of free stuff on curbsides ("Allston Christmas"). If there are similar guides from other universities in other cities I'd be curious to see them - the jaywalking advice might be different in different regions, for instance.

The advice and examples make me feel warm and fuzzy, imagining a grad student who is navigating stuff like buying a wedding gift for a colleague, saying "I'll pass" when offered another slice of pizza at a party, successfully cold-emailing an industry expert, choosing a Halloween costume, commiserating with colleagues about being bored to tears during a dull seminar, successfully checking in with a friend about whether to take their shoes off at the door, and understanding when the friend says "make yourself at home". I am happy for this composite person and glad this advice has helped them.
posted by brainwane at 4:06 AM on March 18, 2021 [29 favorites]


When you say "I could care less" you mean "this is so unimportant to me that I won't even make an effort to care less; I could care less, but why bother."

It's the intonation.


The difference probably is intonational, but seemingly not quite in that way. "I could care less" is ungrammatical, but has caught on as a rough synonym for "I do not care", for some unclear reason, usually in place of the more grammatically correct "I couldn't care less." Both are generally used as a reply to some statement or claim of vague importance, like "But X really really cares about that activity.", when people reply "I couldn't care less." the emphasis tends to fall on "couldn't" in the more proper sense of the replier having no interest in X's interests in the matter to the extent of it being the least possible consideration the replier would entertain, but when someone replies "I could care less" the emphasis tends to fall on the "I" or is uttered largely unstressed.

The seeming idea of the latter is more that the repliers interest is less than that of anyone else, the implication being that while the speaker and some potential group of others may be concerned with X's interests, the replier is not, so the closer intonational suggestion is more "I could care less than anyone about that", with the predicate dropped. Since I think it's uncommon for people to vary between both uses, I suspect the difference is in a sort of mis-referencing of the intended function of the phrase, where the "correct" use is an absolute individual disregard for the subject, while the "incorrect" use is more a comparative between the individual and others, at least that's the best I can figure by use as a desired replacement for I don't care.
posted by gusottertrout at 4:10 AM on March 18, 2021 [1 favorite]


Came across this list comparison today, of American words that most Brits don't know, and vice versa. (pus is percentage of americans who know the word, puk is percentage of UK people, presumably from a survey)

Having never been to the US, of the US words, I know Tilapia (thanks, Animal Crossing!), Acetaminophen and Albuterol (that we know as paracetamol and ventolin/"blue inhaler" respectively). I've seen "hibachi grill" referred to and presume it's some sort of cooking device; but a grill is usually the electric element at the top of the oven, which I think you call a broiler?[1] "Connipition" brings to mind some sort of misogynist '50s term ala hysterical fit. I'm assuming staph is a Staphylococcus infection, though we'd normally just call it a skin rash or boil I think.

The rest are a mystery (a manicotti sounds like some sort of manicure, and chigger sounds vaguely racist), while I know all the UK ones, unsurprisingly. I'm curious what you call it instead of gazumping, because it is rage inducing.

I'm off to google the new words!

[1] so WTF is it a grilled cheese instead of broiled cheese? We just call it cheese-on-toast.

on preview, US vs UK dates - yes, argggh. I always parse 9/11 as 9th of November first. I also write the month name to avoid ambiguity, or use the ISO date format, which also works great when sorting.
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 4:15 AM on March 18, 2021 [16 favorites]


The dime thing blew my mind. You would think that would be something we all noticed as kids, at least. That is nuts.

“I’m trying to think” doesn’t mean “I’m thinking.” It means STFU I can’t think if you keep telling me your opinion or leaning on me for mine immediately.
posted by Mchelly at 4:18 AM on March 18, 2021 [18 favorites]


I'm quite surprised by conniption not bene recognised much in the UK, I've heard it in the wild here. This sort of list makes me wonder how much of conversations people are actually following or just nodding along to. I'm sure we've all done the latter at some point.
posted by biffa at 4:22 AM on March 18, 2021


In re "dime," there's also "stop on a dime" or "turn on a dime", idioms which require knowledge of what a dime is (the smallest coin) and not its monetary value.

plus of course "drop a dime," which requires knowing about payphones & stool pigeons.
posted by chavenet at 4:25 AM on March 18, 2021 [14 favorites]


"pitch" is also a very dark, tarry substance (now I realize I don't know what it's made from?)

Conifer resin.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 4:32 AM on March 18, 2021 [12 favorites]


being exposed to 90s nickelodeon shows was literally the only reason why my friends and i even have any sort of idea how much is a dime or a nickle (quarter and so forth is still ok). at least there's some sense to it, compared to when my parents giving me their british coins for me to use up when travelling except those were pre-decimalization. but back to the subject of american money, that all the paper notes are the same colour....
posted by cendawanita at 4:38 AM on March 18, 2021 [1 favorite]


If backstop is originally a Britishism this will also delight me

There's a surprising amount of US dialects of English that boil down to "things that UK dialects stopped doing," ranging from old verb forms like "gotten" to some aspects of American southern accents.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 4:48 AM on March 18, 2021 [11 favorites]


I don't know how unique it is but US public interactions are pretty chatty. In a lot of places, no more communication than what's necessary to complete your transaction is entirely common and not considered rude or unfriendly.

I'm from Ireland, generally considered one of the friendliest countries in Europe, and was still taken aback when I moved to California and complete strangers walking the other direction on the footpath sidewalk, sitting in the park, working at a deli counter, anywhere really, would constantly strike up random conversations about whatever jumped into their head. Countries like Finland on the other hand were practising social distancing decades before Covid came along.
posted by kersplunk at 4:51 AM on March 18, 2021 [29 favorites]


Has anyone under the age of 50 actually said "let's go Dutch"? I'm 40 and I'm not sure I understand precisely what it means, other than there is probably a malt shoppe involved.
posted by nebulawindphone at 5:01 AM on March 18, 2021 [11 favorites]


The "small talk" thing is funny if you know New England which is the least friendly part of the country I've ever been in. I'm probably biased living in Pennsylvania but nobody up there is very chatty.
posted by octothorpe at 5:05 AM on March 18, 2021 [6 favorites]


she pointed out that a dime (the smallest coin) only says “One Dime,” with no indication of how many cents it is worth.

It may not come right out and say it, but the implication is there. From Wikipedia: "The word dime comes from the Old French disme (now dîme), meaning "tithe" or "tenth part"."
posted by Paul Slade at 5:12 AM on March 18, 2021 [2 favorites]


There's a surprising amount of US dialects of English that boil down to "things that UK dialects stopped doing," ranging from old verb forms like "gotten" to some aspects of American southern accents.

Same with English as spoken in Ireland, with features like the second person plural ('ye', or 'youse') and words like mitch, grinds, yoke, hames, kip, that dropped out of use in England hundreds of years ago.

This is a common phenomenon. Sardinian is allegedly the closest modern language to Latin, partially due to Sardinia's isolation from mainland Italy. It's like the linguistic equivalent of how Cuba has so many classic cars.
posted by kersplunk at 5:18 AM on March 18, 2021 [24 favorites]


I'm LOLing thinking of running into air quotes for the first time as an adult. It's such a weird gesture! We must look like lunatics when we do it!
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 5:20 AM on March 18, 2021 [14 favorites]


If you're ever in a business meeting including both Americans and Brits, never suggest tabling [some subject]. It means exactly the opposite to each group. Per dictionary:

table verb [with object]
1 British present formally for discussion or consideration at a meeting: more than 200 amendments to the bill have already been tabled.

2 mainly US postpone consideration of: I'd like the issue to be tabled for the next few months.
(I learned this the hard way while working as a British tech author for an American multinational. There were international conference call agendas involved ...)
posted by cstross at 5:26 AM on March 18, 2021 [28 favorites]


I think my favourite American idiom that hasn't crossed the pond (that doesn't appear on the MIT site AFAICT) is "bless your heart".

I understand it can mean, depending upon speaker and context, "awww, I should probably bring you a casserole", to "you're sweet, but really are a few sandwiches short of a picnic aren't you" to "Fuck you and the horse you rode in on, but I'm too polite to say so".
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 5:32 AM on March 18, 2021 [48 favorites]


If you're ever in a business meeting including both Americans and Brits, never suggest tabling [some subject]. It means exactly the opposite to each group.

Quite.
posted by rory at 5:38 AM on March 18, 2021 [16 favorites]


Famously, English understatement led to no support being provided to 600 British troops facing 30,000 Chinese troops in the Korean War when the American general asked the English brigadier for an update and was told "things are a bit sticky, sir".

I was reminded of it watching the Chernobyl mini-series and Dyatlov says "not great, not terrible" while the dosimeters were maxing out.
posted by kersplunk at 5:42 AM on March 18, 2021 [15 favorites]


The "small talk" thing is funny if you know New England which is the least friendly part of the country I've ever been in. I'm probably biased living in Pennsylvania but nobody up there is very chatty.

Massachusetts has had a outdoor mask mandate for most of the past year. In normal times, when we would take the dog for a walk, it was deemed sufficient to meet other dog walkers on the trail with brief eye contact and a flash of a "smile" (basically the office head nod, lips pulled back grimace thing) and on we go. Since no one can see you make that effort nowadays, folks have actually started saying hello to us. It's maddening.
posted by backseatpilot at 5:43 AM on March 18, 2021 [11 favorites]


There's a surprising amount of US dialects of English that boil down to "things that UK dialects stopped doing," ranging from old verb forms like "gotten" to some aspects of American southern accents.

It's a fascinating aspect of colonialism and immigration. Emigres tend to lock their home country cultural practices to the time of their departure and sometimes even amplify them to the point of caricature. When you get a massive wave immigrants all at once you end up with an entire group that ends up out of step with their country/culture of origin. With St. Patrick's day so recent we can all picture how overly "Irish" American Irish are in a way that Irish people living in Ireland just aren't anymore (if they ever were). You can even see appropriations that by other cultures that lock in on specific eras of influence - Japan being a great example where post military occupation some people have reified and refined WWII and immediate post-war Americana to the point where they even out-America America.

Also the Boston Brahmin accent is a fascinating thing that is English derived but ended up out of step with England.
posted by srboisvert at 5:48 AM on March 18, 2021 [8 favorites]


There's one Britishism Americans should adopt: "I'll get back to you in due course." It's so delightfully snotty.
posted by mono blanco at 5:49 AM on March 18, 2021 [6 favorites]


Date format in the US arrrrrrgh. It's like Fahrenheit in how unique-in-a-bad-way the US is in its usage.

I mean, people (including you in that very post!) are much more likely to say “March 18th, 2021” than “the 18th of March 2021.” We just abbreviate the dates exactly like they’re spoken. You might prefer a strict smallest-unit-to-largest-unit format, but you can’t reasonably claim that the American way doesn’t make sense.
posted by showbiz_liz at 5:51 AM on March 18, 2021 [16 favorites]


Has anyone under the age of 50 actually said "let's go Dutch"? I'm 40 and I'm not sure I understand precisely what it means, other than there is probably a malt shoppe involved.

Yes. Though not much recently as I've moved locations plus I think splitting the bill has become more common practice.

Malt shoppe, on the other hand, is an expression I have never used and I have no idea why it would be connected to either each paying your own way or to the nationality?
posted by eviemath at 5:56 AM on March 18, 2021 [1 favorite]


That makes sense, but it does seem curiously premodern; it's the sort of custom you'd expect from an ancient kingdom whose complex and unpredictable calendar is made up on the spot by a cadre of priest-astronomers in a complex ritual, rather than a 250-year-old country which created the Space Shuttle and UNIX.
posted by acb at 5:59 AM on March 18, 2021 [2 favorites]


Here’s one I’ve shared before, but here it is again:

My Gramma's Austrian boyfriend (of forty-odd years) taught himself English with a dictionary and a newspaper subscription. He didn't always get things right, especially idioms.

For example, one afternoon he wanted to teach me how to change the oil in the VW. His routine was to drive out into the desert, drain the oil into the sand (yes, awful), and then replace the plug and refill with fresh thirty weight.

When I asked where we would be doing this chore, he said, "Oh. We’ll just go someplace way out in the moonrocks."

"Hmm ... out in the where?"

"Out in the moonrocks. You know. The ‘moonies’? The countryside? Get the oil let’s go.”
posted by notyou at 6:00 AM on March 18, 2021 [15 favorites]


Has anyone under the age of 50 actually said "let's go Dutch"?

I've usually heard it said under someone's breath as a sort of disclaimer prior to some sort of group outing.

Not so much "let's go Dutch" but rather "See you at the working lunch (remember, we're going dutch)"
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:07 AM on March 18, 2021 [1 favorite]


IMPORTANT (been posted before)
Academic feedback: Guide for students from the USA dealing with UK trained faculty (and vice versa)
posted by lalochezia at 6:12 AM on March 18, 2021 [20 favorites]


You might prefer a strict smallest-unit-to-largest-unit format, but you can’t reasonably claim that the American way doesn’t make sense.

Personally I'm ISO8601 all the way. Of course, very few other people agree with me, so I use normal date formats in correspondence.

Apart from the inherent logical superiority (while inferior to ISO8601) of smallest-unit-to-largest-unit, the lack of sense is in the US/Liberian system is the lack of interchangeability with everyone else in the world.

Maybe, when I get nukes...
posted by pompomtom at 6:23 AM on March 18, 2021 [7 favorites]


When you say "I could care less" you mean "this is so unimportant to me that I won't even make an effort to care less; I could care less, but why bother."

It's the intonation.


Honestly, this used to disturb me, but someone once told me that it's simply embedded sarcasm, and now the American version makes sense. Just mentally add "Like" to the start of the sentence.
posted by pompomtom at 6:28 AM on March 18, 2021 [8 favorites]


"Out in the moonrocks. You know. The ‘moonies’? The countryside? Get the oil let’s go.”

Funnily enough, if he meant the "boondocks," that word is itself a relatively recent (i.e., 20th century) borrowing from Tagalog that Americans started using after the Spanish-American War.
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 6:30 AM on March 18, 2021 [9 favorites]


Academic feedback: Guide for students from the USA dealing with UK trained faculty (and vice versa)

Yes. “Oh, by the way …” will always be the most important bit.
posted by scruss at 6:36 AM on March 18, 2021 [3 favorites]


Yee, and I cannot stress this enough, haw.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 6:55 AM on March 18, 2021 [9 favorites]


There's a phrase I understand came from GPs, that I've adopted for IT support which is the "doorknob question".

Someone will come in for help, have a suitable amount of time discussing whatever, then as they go to leave, hand on the doorknob, they say something like "Oh by the way, I've been meaning to ask..."

Do not be fooled. This is in fact a far more important question than the previous conversation and often why they actually came to see you in the first place, they just couldn't see a way to fit it in, or are embarrassed to admit they don't already know.

For doctors it's stuff like "I've noticed some blood in the toilet", for IT it's "I don't always seem to get my email coming through" and managers tend to deploy "I just wanted to check you hadn't forgotten about..."

Meaning "I'm worried I have cancer", "I didn't get a critical email I'm furious about", and "when are you going to treat my minor issue as the showstopper critical event it should be because I'm a VIP" respectively.
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 6:58 AM on March 18, 2021 [29 favorites]


I mean, people (including you in that very post!) are much more likely to say "March 18th, 2021" than "the 18th of March 2021."

That's the Americanism right there. I've never heard anyone say dates the first way this side of the Atlantic. Btw I work for a multinational in a field where dates are very important and we settled on YYYY-MM-DD UTC very early.

With St. Patrick's day so recent we can all picture how overly "Irish" American Irish are in a way that Irish people living in Ireland just aren't anymore (if they ever were).

Very true - Irish people generally consider Irish-Americans to be American and not Irish. Ireland has ended up much more socially liberal than Irish America. Our last (and next) taoiseach (prime minister) is gay and has an Indian dad and the only people who seem to care are foreign journalists. Our current president (a mostly ceremonial role) is a left-wing poet.

Italy and Italian-Americans are the same story. Gabagool.
posted by kersplunk at 6:59 AM on March 18, 2021 [16 favorites]


“Going Dutch” has a pretty common term all my life. It’s one of our charming little phrases that you don’t realize is an ethnic slur until it just kind of hits you one day. Maybe it’s more common here in New York?
posted by The Underpants Monster at 7:02 AM on March 18, 2021 [3 favorites]


Personally I'm ISO8601 all the way. Of course, very few other people agree with me, so I use normal date formats in correspondence.

Full ISO8601 is excessive, though the big-endian date order (as in 2021-03-18) is inherently sensible; for one, if you use fixed-length fields, sorting it as text is equivalent to sorting it chronologically.

I believe Japan uses a YYMMDD date order.
posted by acb at 7:05 AM on March 18, 2021 [2 favorites]


Very true - Irish people generally consider Irish-Americans to be American and not Irish

Alternatively, there's a level of concentrated Irishness you can't reach unless you're 1/16th-Irish American, wear a Boston Celtics jersey and performatively bear a grudge about the potato famine. It is qualitatively different from the all-too-mundane, naturally-occurring Irishness in actual Ireland, a mundane, modern country filled with logistics depots, office parks, data centres and retail chains, with nary a leprechaun in sight.
posted by acb at 7:08 AM on March 18, 2021 [26 favorites]


Re: I could care less, this is likely one of those American things where a common idiomatic phrase is shortened for pithiness, but in a way that makes it say the opposite of what it means. E.g., "I couldn't care less" became "I could care less" while still meaning the same thing; "You can't eat your cake and have it, too" became "You can't have your cake and eat it, too" while somehow still meaning the same thing; etc.

Americans do this all the time, and don't pay attention to what words may literally mean. I think it's because we're all deeply conditioned from birth by advertising, to understand language as both literally expressive and as a sort-of non-literal, feelings-based sound painting: Gourmet Chinese Food; Homestyle Cooking; Premier Service; etc. Our language is so co-opted by consumerism and media that words are only tenuously holding onto their literal meanings, and nothing surprises me about idiomatic expressions anymore--if I were told that "well melt my face and flay my skin off" means "I'm really excited to hear about that" in the upper mid-west, I'd think 'well, that's a weirdly emphatic one, but OK,' because it's totally plausible. Americans use language in a really improvisatory and personal-feelings-based way, it's both delightful and maddening.
posted by LooseFilter at 7:12 AM on March 18, 2021 [15 favorites]


Americans do this all the time, and don't pay attention to what words may literally mean.

As someone who doesn't live in the US: this is a human-brain tendency, not an American one. And as someone once immersed in literature predating the birth of cradle-to-grave advertising and consumerism: this tendency predates those things too.

words are only tenuously holding onto their literal meanings

That's kind of the nature of words, according to a whole bunch of philosophers (who aren't actually bunched up at all, but you know.)
posted by trig at 7:25 AM on March 18, 2021 [38 favorites]


I learned [UK/US Table] the hard way while working as a British tech author for an American multinational.

Yeah, Canadian here with the same scars.

Canadians (certainly in Ontario and Quebec) also "Take a Decision" often, a direct translation from the French that's spread into more general usage, rather than always "Make a Decision". Never noticed it in context, but got some odd looks with my US counterparts. Of course, now, I just do it deliberately.
posted by bonehead at 7:34 AM on March 18, 2021 [1 favorite]


You might prefer a strict smallest-unit-to-largest-unit format, but you can’t reasonably claim that the American way doesn’t make sense.
posted by showbiz_liz


To clarify: what I particularly mind isn't so much the internal logic within the unit format itself -- I mind that, when I'm texting or emailing or more formally communicating with friends, family, colleagues, bureaucrats, etc. from lots of places, the difference among our formats can cause a little friction and possibly even big misunderstandings unless we take special steps to prevent them. I compare this to the usage of Fahrenheit because of the mental translation that has to happen across borders and the possibility of miscommunication. And -- as with Fahrenheit and Celsius -- the problems don't pop up as much in spontaneous oral conversation, where it's easy to ask a clarifying question and clear up a misunderstanding quickly. But date abbreviations in webpages, emails, bureaucratic forms and schedules, etc. are harder to double-check.

If I'm writing to primarily a US audience I usually write "August 4th" and if I'm writing to primarily an international audience I usually write "4 August". Orally -- I'm not sure! I'll have to notice myself.

Any linguists reading this who can speak to whether people tend to write and speak dates in the same way, or speak them one way and write them another, across languages?
posted by brainwane at 7:34 AM on March 18, 2021


Pennies say “One Cent”
I feel a great disturbance in the force, as though a thousand geeks suddenly cried out, "well, actually, there is no such thing as a US penny. . ."

This is really interesting. The eye contact thing is definitely not appropriate in all US communities. But, it's probably good advice for the MIT campus and neighborhood. Writing this stuff down seems like a good thing, even if it's imperfect. They probably ought to include a "talking to cops" section.

The "how are you" thing still confuses the hell out of me. But, I've moved from a place where casual chatting with strangers means you're about to be scammed to a place where it's rude not to engage. I intellectually understand that the store clerks are neither setting me up for a con or trying to date me. Asking weirdly personal questions is just what store clerks do here. But, it still feels very strange.
posted by eotvos at 7:35 AM on March 18, 2021 [2 favorites]


I admit, I find it endearing that other cultures are confused/annoyed by our chattiness. Maybe we're just really lonely? Or maybe our ancestors left the old country because we annoyed the shit out of people. Either/or.
posted by emjaybee at 7:36 AM on March 18, 2021 [9 favorites]


if I were told that "well melt my face and flay my skin off" means "I'm really excited to hear about that" in the upper mid-west, I'd think 'well, that's a weirdly emphatic one, but OK,' because it's totally plausible. Americans use language in a really improvisatory and personal-feelings-based way, it's both delightful and maddening.

I reckon everyone does this. I'm a Victorian, and if you told me that Queenslanders had taken (eg) the Kiwi 'jandal' to mean 'thong', I'd likely believe you (except that I've been to Queensland). With however many States the US has, how would one even know what the local version is?

To be fair, re:
Americans use language in a really improvisatory and personal-feelings-based way

I think the interesting thing would be if anyone doesn't use language in a really improvisatory and personal-feelings-based way.
posted by pompomtom at 7:39 AM on March 18, 2021 [5 favorites]


We have Allston Christmas where I live too, but we don't have a cute name for it. I just call it "free stuff day."
posted by jenfullmoon at 7:41 AM on March 18, 2021


(that 'dime' thing is funny and cool though)
posted by pompomtom at 7:42 AM on March 18, 2021


Maybe we're just really lonely? Or maybe our ancestors left the old country because we annoyed the shit out of people. Either/or.

¿Por qué no los dos? :)

I read the Academic Translation list and I conclude that my Canadian educational experiences were British.
posted by warriorqueen at 7:51 AM on March 18, 2021 [3 favorites]


From my perspective, i don't particularly find Americans to be that peculiarly chatty. But otoh i don't think of say, Londoners, when I say this. Glasgow where i studied was plenty chatty to me (but honestly that could just be me), and because even with international student fees it's still more affordable for a rather substantial number of North Americans to be there. What's noticeable was the volume. During orientation week, how you could tell someone's an American was if you could still hear their conversation at least a dozen feet away.
posted by cendawanita at 7:59 AM on March 18, 2021 [8 favorites]


big-endian date order (as in 2021-03-18) is inherently sensible; for one, if you use fixed-length fields, sorting it as text is equivalent to sorting it chronologically.

It's obviously incalculable, but I'd love to know how many lives have been lost over-all by Excel fucking up dates due to the date format. It wouldn't be a small number.
posted by pompomtom at 8:00 AM on March 18, 2021 [7 favorites]


When you say "I could care less" you mean "this is so unimportant to me that I won't even make an effort to care less; I could care less, but why bother."

It's the intonation.
Honestly, this used to disturb me, but someone once told me that it's simply embedded sarcasm, and now the American version makes sense. Just mentally add "Like" to the start of the sentence.


Yeah, no. There is no special other meaning for "I could care less." It's just a mistake, the same way people sometimes say, "For all intensive purposes" or "It's a doggy dog world" or "These things are one in the same" or "I must of forgotten."
posted by slkinsey at 8:00 AM on March 18, 2021 [23 favorites]


Hmm, I think those examples are wrong in a different way.
posted by chavenet at 8:02 AM on March 18, 2021 [5 favorites]


I love that this has spawned like a dozen different debates about how pedantic to be on some issue or other. I love you, Metafilter, never change.
posted by nebulawindphone at 8:03 AM on March 18, 2021 [22 favorites]


Lord, the idiom list for those who ended up at a southern US university would have been endless.

Also, with all this conversation of "dimes," it is time once again for me to remind you that if an elderly white person in the south offers or asks you for a "yankee dime," they might try to kiss you. And yes, Mom, it still makes me uncomfortable when you use the expression. Jeez.
posted by thivaia at 8:08 AM on March 18, 2021 [5 favorites]


Very true - Irish people generally consider Irish-Americans to be American and not Irish

The main exception being when they're someone important, and we're trying to plámás them into doing something for us. They immediately become considered super-Irish at that point.
posted by scorbet at 8:09 AM on March 18, 2021 [6 favorites]


It may not come right out and say it, but the implication is there.

Merchi, cieet utile.
posted by zamboni at 8:09 AM on March 18, 2021


Hmm, I think those examples are wrong in a different way.

A little, yes. But I still think it's a matter of repeating a thing without thinking about it too much and getting it wrong. And with that particular phrase the mistake also spread due to people repeating the mistake. I could buy someone saying it deliberately if the intonation/word stress, "I could care less, but..." however this is not the way the vast majority of people says it.
posted by slkinsey at 8:10 AM on March 18, 2021 [2 favorites]


> "if I were told that 'well melt my face and flay my skin off' means 'I'm really excited to hear about that' ... "

I am adopting this immediately.
posted by kyrademon at 8:10 AM on March 18, 2021 [3 favorites]


There's a surprising amount of US dialects of English that boil down to "things that UK dialects stopped doing," ranging from old verb forms like "gotten" to some aspects of American southern accents.

My favorite of these, the one that makes British English speakers' heads explode when you tell them about it, is that the weird American word for what everyone else calls football is not only British in origin, but distinctly Oxonian.

"Soccer" derives from a specific form of late 19th and early 20th Oxonian slang where nicknames for things are formed by abbreviating and then adding "er" or "ers". So "breakfast" becomes "brek" becomes "brekkers", "champagne" becomes "champ" becomes "champers", and "Association Football" (as distinct from Rugby Football) becomes "assoc" becomes "soccer".
posted by firechicago at 8:14 AM on March 18, 2021 [38 favorites]



The rest are a mystery (a manicotti sounds like some sort of manicure, and chigger sounds vaguely racist), while I know all the UK ones, unsurprisingly. I'm curious what you call it instead of gazumping, because it is rage inducing.


That list is fun! I only know 3 of the UK ones. The majority of the US ones are borrowed from other languages, Spanish, Hawaiian, German, and Italian respectively. Some are extremely regional like chigger (a small bug that hides in grass and bites you), conniption (very common in the south, not sure about anywhere else, but not at all common where I live in the west), and goober (either a peanut or an old timey word for an idiot or fool).
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:26 AM on March 18, 2021


the Kiwi 'jandal' to mean 'thong'

Umm...
posted by basalganglia at 8:26 AM on March 18, 2021 [1 favorite]


If you're ever in a business meeting including both Americans and Brits, never suggest tabling [some subject]. It means exactly the opposite to each group.

I worked for a multinational tech company you've heard of, and this specific example was used during this year's workplace diversity training in the "Try Not To Use Local Idioms When Talking to Work Colleagues" section.

That section has the usual "don't use local sports references" (Straight out of left field, he was down for the count, etc), and "Don't use very old sayings that barely make sense even in their original language (I'm just casting a brick to attract jade, 9 cows and 1 strand of hair, and other Mandarin sayings), the "table" thing was super interesting since both sides would believe they understood what was being said, unlike let's say " 9 cows and 1 strand of hair", which is along the lines of "just getting started", or "just a drop in the bucket".
posted by sideshow at 8:29 AM on March 18, 2021 [7 favorites]


There is no special other meaning for "I could care less." It's just a mistake

I could agree its a mistake, but there are things I could care less about at some undefined point in the future, so the use of that phrase doesn't bother me.

The minuate about my job would be one example. The intricacies of diapers. I used to care a lot about diapers. Now I care much less. I'm assuming in the future, I'll care even less about them.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:29 AM on March 18, 2021 [3 favorites]


Also, I am skeptical that only 28% of people in the UK know what a kabob is. I think you guys write them differently, but you still recognize the concept, right? Deliciousness on a stick?
posted by basalganglia at 8:30 AM on March 18, 2021 [3 favorites]


In the US, a block is a square or rectangular bit of a city defined by the streets which are in a grid system. I've been told that blocks don't exist in the UK.

Absolutely No-You-Know-What, thank you for this list. One thing I'm taking away from it is that there's a lot less Italian influence in England than in the US.

You might as well know that in Philadelphia and a few other places, what most Americans would call tomato sauce is called gravy.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 8:30 AM on March 18, 2021


@Nancy Lebovitz, I thought my Pennsylvania-born Grandma was just being weird when she called it “tomato gravy!”

I always assumed that English people put the day before the month when speaking because of “Remember, remember the fifth of November.” Then again, I’ve done stranger things in the service of a rhyme scheme in my day.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 8:36 AM on March 18, 2021


Wait, I'm sorry, me telling people they're free to reach out to me instead of saying "contact me" is a result of an AT&T commercial in the 70s!?

It's funny because that phrase was clearly around in this other song a decade prior to the one they reference.
posted by StarkRoads at 8:36 AM on March 18, 2021 [2 favorites]


"Try Not To Use Local Idioms When Talking to Work Colleagues"

The fun part here is identifying local idioms. After almost 20 years outside of Ireland, I'm still coming across bits of Hiberno-English that I assumed were universal English words/phrases.

Also, I am skeptical that only 28% of people in the UK know what a kabob is, I think you guys write them differently

I can confirm that a) I would not have said that I knew what a kabob is and b) I am aware of what a kebab is. Somehow the spelling is enough that it makes it look like a completely different thing.
posted by scorbet at 8:40 AM on March 18, 2021 [11 favorites]


I always assumed that English people put the day before the month when speaking because of “Remember, remember the fifth of November.”

I asked about this once.
posted by trig at 8:42 AM on March 18, 2021 [1 favorite]


Also, I am skeptical that only 28% of people in the UK know what a kabob is. I think you guys write them differently, but you still recognize the concept, right? Deliciousness on a stick?

Isn't a UK kebab in the gyro / tacos al pastor / shawarma family, not in the served-on-a-stick family?
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 8:42 AM on March 18, 2021 [2 favorites]


I bristled at the Americanism of 'Dutch' being a slur, so I'm gonna write a thing. This is mainly for the area that was originally colonized by the Dutch, but some of this usage has made it countrywide.
In American Vernacular English (Archaic), the modifier 'Dutch' signifies 'clever substitute / workaround'.
A close family friend, but not actually a blood relation? Dutch Uncle.
A cottage kitchen door, cut in half so you can swing the top open like a window, leaving the bottom half shut to keep the chickens out/baby in? Dutch Door. The full glass of whiskey you drink in one go before taking the stage at karaoke? Dutch Courage.
Need to bake bread, but you're living in a tent while you cut the logs for your pioneer cabin? Shovel hot coals onto the heavy iron lid of your heavy iron pot and boom. Dutch Oven. Doing something with pie dough and apples, but can't be bothered to make a second crust for the top? Just throw some extra butter and sugar on the top to brown and get crunchy. Some may call it a Crumble, or a Brown Betty, but it's also a Dutch Apple Pie.

But back to Going Dutch. It's just separate checks for each person. But the concept, I think, becomes an important Americanism. I don't know if this relates to actual people living in the Netherlands, but the Dutch early colonists had a reputation as being 1) tight with money 2) blunt to the point other peoples found them rude, and 3) almost totally disinterested in the protocols and rituals of social hierarchy.

Who pays for the meal used to be kind of a big deal, once upon a time. Am I hosting you? Are you hosting me? A father and his adult son eat lunch at the tavern; when the check comes, is it a matter of patrician dominance? Or filial piety?
Even into the 20th century. ...Is this a date? Or 'Just because you're buying me steak, doesn't mean I'm signing a contract for that new ad campaign, Don Draper'.

But back in the day, the early Anglo- and Franco-Americans - still coming from a culture of snobbery wrapped in irony and swimming in sarcasm sauce, would occasionally be shocked, sitting at a table with a Knickerbocker in their knee-buckled breeches, casually doing something so blatantly societal-status-ignoring as "How about you pay for your meal, and I pay for mine? There. Now no one has to keep a little notebook, of obligations, and whose turn it is, and how many dinners count against a wedding invitation. Nee nee nee, who has time for that? You have your meal, I have mine, now we can sit and talk as equals."

That kind of thinking got to be really American. If you're coming from a rigid class and patronage system, or elaborate manners that you can't possibly apply in this new immigant situation, or where you sometimes have to awkwardly figure out if the other person is older or younger than you, so you know which pronouns to use, the American custom of Going Dutch - we eat together, but don't owe each other anything, both by choice - might be a welcome relief.
posted by bartleby at 8:43 AM on March 18, 2021 [45 favorites]


Oh this is reminding me of my spouse clarifying his language usage when a translator (translating his software architecture book into Chinese) asked:

What does this metaphor mean? ["the Whoopee Cushion and Joy Buzzer of Internet protocols"]

Does "dissed" here mean "criticized"?

What does it mean by "it doesn't know a username from an ostrich"? Does the "ostrich" here have any special meaning?

In chapter 4, there is a section titled "Resource-Oriented What Now?". I failed to figure out that "what now" means here. Can you explain the title?


My spouse noted: "strangely (or not), nobody asked about 'Don't Bogart the Benefits of REST.'"
posted by brainwane at 8:47 AM on March 18, 2021 [8 favorites]


What I can't figure out is how anyone deals with all of our sports metaphors. Quarterback? Touchdown? Shortstop? Bottom of the 9th? What do you mean, it's only called a Strike if you don't hit the ball?
posted by bartleby at 8:48 AM on March 18, 2021 [4 favorites]


brainwane, I want to read your spouse's architecture book.
posted by snerson at 8:51 AM on March 18, 2021 [6 favorites]


Also, I am skeptical that only 28% of people in the UK know what a kabob is. I think you guys write them differently, but you still recognize the concept, right? Deliciousness on a stick?

UK kebab usually refers to "doner kebab," a large piece of meat slowly turning on a vertical spit, with pieces shaved off and served in some kind of flatbread. In the US we'd usually call that gyros or shawarma, I've also heard "pita wrap." Kebab shops are everywhere in the UK and they're open late, so they're a popular food for late night drinking.

US kebab/kabob usually refers to "shish kebab," small pieces of meat and vegetables grilled on a thin skewer and also served while still on the skewer.
posted by castlebravo at 8:52 AM on March 18, 2021 [14 favorites]


the Kiwi 'jandal' to mean 'thong'

Umm...


This is an entire thread about how some US usages are different to other cultures. Yes, thong means different things in different places. Dropping in a passive-aggressive 'umm…' correction is pretty weird.
posted by zamboni at 9:06 AM on March 18, 2021 [5 favorites]


Yes, thong means different things in different places.
'Thong' in the US can also mean flip flop shoes (well a single flip flop), not just underwear.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:13 AM on March 18, 2021 [2 favorites]


What I can't figure out is how anyone deals with all of our sports metaphors. Quarterback? Touchdown? Shortstop? Bottom of the 9th? What do you mean, it's only called a Strike if you don't hit the ball?

Probably 99% of what I know about sports comes from the use of sports metaphors in general speech.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 9:16 AM on March 18, 2021 [3 favorites]


Also, I am skeptical that only 28% of people in the UK know what a kabob is. I think you guys write them differently, but you still recognize the concept, right? Deliciousness on a stick?

Yeah, kebab shops are a very common feature in the low-rent end of the high street. I never would have guessed that was a kabob. I believe ours are usually a turkish import, though you do get greek restaurants too in larger places.

Kebab can mean a shish kebab (meat cubes and veg flame-grilled on a stick) or a doner kebab; if you just ask for a 'kebab' you'll get the latter. Usually lamb pressed into an inverted cone, cooked on a vertical spit and shaved, served in a pitta bread with an excess of salad, mandatory chilli pepper and choice of sauce - often with chips (fries). Very high fat, a standard meal after a night of excessive drinking. The chicken doner also exists, but I've never dared try one.

The difference in pasta shapes is interesting. I've never heard of or seen manicotti; our closest common equivalent I guess would be tortelloni and ravioli, usually found in the deli section. Ziti is what we call pasta bake when cooked at home, or pasta al forno at a restaurant, invariably done with penne.

Others are just different names. Garbanzo = chickpeas, crawdad = crayfish, Kielbasa = Wiejska, though german wurst are more well-known. Sandlot seems pretty similar to 'recreation ground', or rec, local rough ground for children's football etc. We have less mexican food; fajitas and tacos are well known I think, but not tamales or tomatillo.
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 9:22 AM on March 18, 2021




The_Vegetables: "'Thong' in the US can also mean flip flop shoes (well a single flip flop), not just underwear."

My friends and I called flip flops "J-WOWS," I don't know who started that or if we invented it or imported it. It was just what we called them: "Jesus walks on water shoes"
posted by chavenet at 9:26 AM on March 18, 2021 [6 favorites]


UK kebab usually refers to "doner kebab," a large piece of meat slowly turning on a vertical spit, with pieces shaved off and served in some kind of flatbread. In the US we'd usually call that gyros or shawarma, I've also heard "pita wrap."

Shawarma and doner are two different kebab styles/traditions aren't they? In the UK, I'd generally expect something mince-based if sold doner, and slices of cut lamb if sold shawarma (though both are indeed on the vertical rotisserie).
posted by Dysk at 9:31 AM on March 18, 2021 [2 favorites]


From the “reach out” page:
AT&T (originally Bell Labs) popularized this phrase...
Um what? Is this some kind of MIT in-joke?
posted by sjswitzer at 9:33 AM on March 18, 2021


But I still think it's a matter of repeating a thing without thinking about it too much and getting it wrong. And with that particular phrase the mistake also spread due to people repeating the mistake. I could buy someone saying it deliberately if the intonation/word stress,

Yes, of course these kinds of phrases arise from mishearing and repetition, but that doesn't preclude them also gaining a hold for that mistake having a similar, but slightly different use than is held in the "correct" version. The people using the "different versions" usually only use one of the two, not both, which makes those who use the "proper" version confident they're doing it right and the others who are just wrong, rather than listening to see if it is the exact same thing or a slight variation based on a cue in the "mistake". Of course people are going to vary and some phrases will just gain hold from hearing them, or mishearing them used repeatedly, but that mishearing still can connect to some use, even if not the grammatically correct one, since the rules of grammar.

Intensive purposes can draws on the idea of intensity, important or meaningful purposes, not the near redundancy of all designs/plans and purposes. "One and the same" is likewise a purposeful redundancy to express the two things believed different actually weren't, but "one in the same" are close to one and the same, but the latter carries more a notion of the idea inhabiting a specific form, as in this is the embodiment of that thing we were talking about earlier, where the former just say the two things/concepts are identical. The aspect of redundnacy on the part of the "right" users of the terms suggests as much waste on their parts as errors in hearing for anyone new to the terms.

In the same fashion "must have forgotten" is an odd construct since the "must" isn't really necessary. "We forgot" would be the clearer way to say something, so the "must" is doing some unusual work there as must is frequently an imperative, but in this use a presumption tied to past occurrence, which is important to note because you won't here people say "we must of a key to enter" or other present tense "misuses" of "of". This suggests that the use of "of" is thinking of the relationship as functional, even if "must of" comes from must've or musta, since it isn't used every time "must" and "have" are paired together. And obviously anyone who say "Doggy dog world" isn't referencing the same concept as "dog eat dog world", even if the mistake arises from a mishearing, it is saying something else entirely, which points to what I've been suggesting.
posted by gusottertrout at 9:33 AM on March 18, 2021


Intensive purposes can draws on the idea of intensity, important or meaningful purposes, not the near redundancy of all designs/plans and purposes.

Which is why the meaning is different. I've never heard anyone say "for all intents and purposes" and mean 'for the critical/intended functions of the thing, not necessarily all of them' but I've witnessed workplace confusion over someone using "all intensive purposes" to mean just that.
posted by Dysk at 9:37 AM on March 18, 2021 [3 favorites]


Oh eviemath, I forgot about the Malt Shoppe bit.
For like half a century, in puritanical America, a chaste date option was to get ice cream together. You could be the minister's daughter and be out talking with a boy, un-chaperoned, as long as it was in a public, 'wholesome' place. And what's more innocent than having a malted milkshake in the window of the ice cream place on Main Street? And of course, you Go Dutch there too, so that nobody gets any funny ideas.
posted by bartleby at 9:38 AM on March 18, 2021 [5 favorites]


Tomatillo – baby tomato :) (from Spanish, no one knows if it’s a tomato or a baby)

They're a completely different species! Unless you use tomatillo to refer to baby tomatoes in (maybe some parts of) the US as well?
posted by Dysk at 9:43 AM on March 18, 2021 [8 favorites]


Probably 99% of what I know about sports comes from the use of sports metaphors in general speech.
I was at dinner for a dream-job interview and one of the committee members spoke at length about the need to try to be welcoming to "female students" by avoiding language such as "dream team." I was a savvy enough adult, professional-class white guy not to ask what the hell a "dream team" meant and pretend I understood both the reference and why it might be gendered. (I got the job.) I looked it up later and was slightly annoyed. I assumed it was some comic book reference that I also didn't happen to recognize, rather than a sports thing. Later, I was surprised to learn, also in a professional context, that a "hail Mary pass" is so much less interesting than one might imagine based on the words themselves.

I'm not sure using sports language is necessarily a bad thing. But, I know people would be very confused if I used metaphors based upon my weird personal interests at work. And I work among unbelievably geeky and kind polymaths.
posted by eotvos at 9:46 AM on March 18, 2021 [3 favorites]


In American Vernacular English (Archaic), the modifier 'Dutch' signifies 'clever substitute / workaround'

But back to Going Dutch. It's just separate checks for each person.


"Going Dutch" is an example of that usage of "Dutch" - the phrase used to be "Dutch treat" - i.e. pay for yourself = not really a treat at all.
posted by Daily Alice at 9:47 AM on March 18, 2021 [1 favorite]


Have you ever heard anyone say "get down to work"?

Yes, from my friend who worked in a basement.
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:48 AM on March 18, 2021 [5 favorites]


In the UK, I'd generally expect something mince-based if sold doner, and slices of cut lamb if sold shawarma (though both are indeed on the vertical rotisserie).

The proper turkish doner is made of slices of lamb, marinated overnight and stuck together for cooking. The UK cheap doner is usually a grey slurry pressed together, often only even mostly mechanically recovered lamb, and the standards of where that meat is kept and processed certainly used to be eye-watering, no idea if it's gotten better. And the salt and fat content is staggering, equivalent to a wine glass of cooking oil and a couple of heaped teaspoons of salt in one serving.

My local kebab and grill is quite good, you can actually see the bits of lamb that make up the doner, but I still stick to the shish these days. God, a hangover-smothering kebab smothered in garlic mayo after a long night in the pub with your best mates was tasty though. I guess you can never go back to your 20s.
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 9:49 AM on March 18, 2021 [1 favorite]


complex and unpredictable ... made up on the spot by a cadre of priest-astronomers in a complex ritual [...] UNIX.

This is more accurate than I’d like.
posted by zamboni at 9:51 AM on March 18, 2021 [4 favorites]


I always assumed "dutch angle" was a sophisticated art history reference that I didn't understand. It isn't, as far as I can tell.
posted by eotvos at 9:52 AM on March 18, 2021 [1 favorite]


Has anyone under the age of 50 actually said "let's go Dutch"?


How else would one suggest to their companion an afternoon of standing in wooden clogs by a windmill and snacking on poffertjes?
posted by otherchaz at 9:53 AM on March 18, 2021 [19 favorites]


I managed to stump my husband a couple weeks back when I told him I couldn't find a parking spot for love nor money. That was a fun one to explain.

I'm fairly sure attributing miserliness to another nationality features in most languages; in Italian it's the Portuguese. And splitting the check alla romana means splitting the check equally, no matter what you ate.
posted by romakimmy at 9:53 AM on March 18, 2021 [2 favorites]


I have a friend who thinks it's "the whole kitten caboodle".

In 10 years time I can totally see someone arguing "of course kitten and poodle makes sense, it means the whole collection, cats and dogs! What the hell is a caboodle?"
posted by Jobst at 9:54 AM on March 18, 2021 [13 favorites]


This is an entire thread about how some US usages are different to other cultures. Yes, thong means different things in different places. Dropping in a passive-aggressive 'umm…' correction is pretty weird.

It wasn't a correction. Just another example of how the same word has different meanings around the world (and this one in particular is a bit risqué.) For a thread that started with a primer for international college students to get familiar with Americanisms, I contend that the difference between thong and thong is VERY relevant.

Anyway, sorry to have come off as passive-aggressive instead of amusing.
posted by basalganglia at 9:55 AM on March 18, 2021 [3 favorites]


I have a friend who thinks it's "the whole kitten caboodle".

No, no, it's the kitten canoodle! At the malt shoppe! While going Dutch!
posted by basalganglia at 9:56 AM on March 18, 2021 [7 favorites]


I do vaguely recall hearing that (in some Nordic country?) when something (someone?) is spectacularly out of control, it has 'Gone Texas'. That's fun too.
posted by bartleby at 9:58 AM on March 18, 2021 [10 favorites]


I've given some thought to the mm/dd versus dd/mm date format once I realized the written form was just an abbreviation of the spoken form, and I think it's ironic that the only date that Americans commonly use in the British style (day then month) is the 4th of July. Independence day.
posted by Kyol at 9:59 AM on March 18, 2021 [3 favorites]


The proper turkish doner is made of slices of lamb, marinated overnight and stuck together for cooking. The UK cheap doner is usually a grey slurry...

Yeah, that's why I specified that that was my expectation/experience in the UK.
posted by Dysk at 9:59 AM on March 18, 2021


Daily Alice: ""Going Dutch" is an example of that usage of "Dutch" - the phrase used to be "Dutch treat" - i.e. pay for yourself = not really a treat at all."

Now we need to explain "Pass the Dutchie" and the "Double Dutch Bus" while singing "New Amsterdam" at the top of our lungs, "Till I speak double dutch to a real double duchess"...
posted by chavenet at 10:01 AM on March 18, 2021 [4 favorites]


It still kind of blows me away that donair is a Canadian-mostly thing, given how ubiquitous they are here. They're not doners, and definitely not shawarma (we have those too, often sold in the same place).

They are closest to gyros, though also distinct from those as well; they're beef not lamb, and have a sweet sauce all their own. The meat is supplemented with tomatoes in the Halifax original, though non-Halifax versions also sometimes add lettuce and other condiments.
posted by bonehead at 10:12 AM on March 18, 2021 [3 favorites]


Double Dutch is two-rope jump rope / rope skipping.
Even Malcom McClaren knows this.
posted by bartleby at 10:12 AM on March 18, 2021 [3 favorites]


If you're coming from a rigid class and patronage system, or elaborate manners that you can't possibly apply in this new immigant situation[...]

That was my understanding of the classic ask vs guess culture thread - if you're on an island that historically hasn't had much inward migration - like Ireland or Japan, everyone is on the same page and small changes in words, tone, and body language convey a lot and are understood by everybody. Immigrants in a great big melting pot need to be straightforward and say it as they see it or risk being ignored or misunderstood.
posted by kersplunk at 10:23 AM on March 18, 2021 [5 favorites]


gusottertrout: Intensive purposes can draws on the idea of intensity, important or meaningful purposes, not the near redundancy of all designs/plans and purposes.
Dysk: Which is why the meaning is different. I've never heard anyone say "for all intents and purposes" and mean 'for the critical/intended functions of the thing, not necessarily all of them' but I've witnessed workplace confusion over someone using "all intensive purposes" to mean just that.


It would be one thing if people were using these "new ways" of saying idiomatic phrasings to signify something different from the original meaning. But this is almost never the case. Again, we can return to the original example: The phrase "I could care less" is still used to signify "I don't care," which is the point of the original idiom. This might be different if intoned as "I could care less" with "but I don't" being implied, but I see no evidence that this usage is in the vernacular anywhere. The simple explanation is that the n't is sometimes left out due to some combination of mishearing and not thinking it through.
posted by slkinsey at 10:24 AM on March 18, 2021 [6 favorites]


Does the Dutch in ‘going Dutch’ refer to Dutch or Germans? We have various Dutch places here (e.g. Dutchvillage Rd) which are named after what the German settlers called themselves.
posted by hydrobatidae at 10:33 AM on March 18, 2021 [2 favorites]


I understand "I could care less" to mean "I care so little about this matter that I'm not even going to be bothered about saying how much care I actually have about it in a pedantically and grammatically correct manner".
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 10:34 AM on March 18, 2021 [6 favorites]


They are closest to gyros, though also distinct from those as well; they're beef not lamb, and have a sweet sauce all their own.

FWIW gyros in Greece is *never* lamb - it's always pork (default option) or chicken (more recent development). The pork is served with tzatziki, and the chicken usually with some kind of mayo/mustard, mayo/ketchup or mayo/ketchup/mustard combo sauce.
posted by each day we work at 10:41 AM on March 18, 2021 [6 favorites]


Re: I could care less, this is likely one of those American things where a common idiomatic phrase is shortened for pithiness, but in a way that makes it say the opposite of what it means. E.g., [...] "You can't eat your cake and have it, too" became "You can't have your cake and eat it, too" while somehow still meaning the same thing; etc.

Disagree that the grammar of these two variants necessarily implies any different meaning, even when interpreting literally. The "and" here doesn't have to imply a temporal relationship! The second variant is still true in that light.
posted by Expecto Cilantro at 10:50 AM on March 18, 2021 [2 favorites]


I’m still not convinced New England is an actual place.

Well, it's neither new nor England.

On another note, I failed to find cattywampus in the idioms.

Still, Lower Cattywampus would be acceptable as a replacement for New England.
posted by y2karl at 10:52 AM on March 18, 2021 [2 favorites]


There is no special other meaning for "I could care less." It's just a mistake

I don't see it as a mistake, but as an elision from "Like (or As though, As if) I could care less."
posted by tclark at 10:53 AM on March 18, 2021 [2 favorites]


but back to the subject of american money, that all the paper notes are the same colour....

This hasn't been true for twenty years, but many people in the U.S. believe it is, which I find fascinating. The colors are subtle in some cases, but $1 bills are the only bills that are still the traditional color. The $100, $50, and $10 bills are clearly not green. I once pointed this out to a customer as a cashier, and she looked at me like I'd told her the sun rises in the west, or something.
posted by Comet Bug at 10:58 AM on March 18, 2021 [2 favorites]


There is no special other meaning for "I could care less." It's just a mistake

I don't see it as a mistake, but as an elision from "Like (or As though, As if) I could care less."


Well then you're wrong. But then, care me if I ask....
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:06 AM on March 18, 2021 [2 favorites]


I had a look at the guide again to see if there's anything mentioned on spoons... And ok, my young self was definitely *very* puzzled that I'm having rice dishes with no spoons provided, only the knife and the fork. Yes, I've heard and read the various explanations, but all i could say is whenever i encounter some kind of sitcom joke where the character is amazed Thai places set their tables with a fork and a spoon, i laugh, but from the other direction.

But really, this kind of thing I would've gobbled it up, as it's all part of that whole 'growing up in an anglophonic developing country' life, in that we're one of those where the best and the brightest were sent on scholarships to the anglo parts of the BrCommonwealth... And the US. And back in the day, every so often a precocious scholar gets a fairly regular column in a local rag sharing their student life etc. And of course pre-internet, the consciousness that these are regional dialects might not arrive by the time we arrive at college or uni. And being what we are, naturally we've internalized the idea of 'correct English'. Showing off your understanding of nuances can become part of social mobility work, let's just say.

I only mention all that because when I was a pre-teen, i read such a column who put the fear of social embarassment in me because the columnist was narrating HER utter embarassment that 'rubber' isn't eraser! It's actually condoms! How utterly provincial of her (and us) to not know! For years I'd make a point to deliberately never use 'rubber', in my BrEnglish environment.

Of course you can see how it ends. "Ohhhhh, it's an American English word...." And that's my villain origin story.
posted by cendawanita at 11:09 AM on March 18, 2021 [3 favorites]


It still kind of blows me away that donair is a Canadian-mostly thing, given how ubiquitous they are here.

They’re not even Canada-wide. Can’t speak for the west, but donairs are nearly non-existent in Ontario. Shawarma places are nearly as thick as timmies, though. Even small towns usually have at least one.
posted by rodlymight at 11:10 AM on March 18, 2021 [2 favorites]


Disagree that the grammar of these two variants necessarily implies any different meaning, even when interpreting literally. The "and" here doesn't have to imply a temporal relationship! The second variant is still true in that light.

I think this one is confusing because they chose such a large desert as a referent. You can have eaten a piece of your cake and have the rest of it left, which implies that you actually can both have and eat your cake. It'd make a lot more sense if they'd used some appropriately sized food that becomes inedible if you vacillate between the choice to retain or consume.
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:11 AM on March 18, 2021 [2 favorites]


The colors are subtle in some cases, but $1 bills are the only bills that are still the traditional color.

Is it possible old bills are in circulation? The last time I got fresh bills at the moneychanger was a couple of years ago. But also it's definitely a matter of comparison, because I'm rarely confused with other currencies that i guess are less subtle in colouration.
posted by cendawanita at 11:12 AM on March 18, 2021


I'm sure the Nordic countries are similarly helpful when they put immigrants and refugees into their cultural re-education camps

sorry cultural adjustment classes, and this isn't anything like the ethnocide that post-colonial scholars talk about.

These people all want it, after all.
posted by paimapi at 11:16 AM on March 18, 2021


"Conniption" is what your mom has when you're a teenager in an 80s movie and stay out past curfew or wreck the family car.

"I admit, I find it endearing that other cultures are confused/annoyed by our chattiness."


I read once a theory that Americans were so hyper-friendly because of the legacy of the frontier, when places were very sparsely settled, and there was a survival benefit to being friendly to other people that you saw, who might be your only lifeline in a disaster. Whereas Europe was already fairly urbanized in many places and in highly urban places it's more polite to pretend you don't know who someone is or that they were fighting with their spouse last night because everybody lives in very close quarters. So in sparsely populated places, people valued connection, and privacy was abundant; whereas in densely populated places, social connection opportunities were abundant, but people valued privacy, which was scarce. Which is an intriguing theory, and would also explain the famous New York rudeness.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 11:18 AM on March 18, 2021 [9 favorites]


Considering how little attention a lot of people pay to small differences in color, the subtle differences between US denominations don't count for much. Other countries have paper money with color differences that I don't think people with normal color vision can ignore.

I took a look at a $5 bill. It's mostly the usual drab green. There's some vague pinkishness on the front, and one of the large fives in the corner is purple. This is only a vague gesture at being a different color.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 11:23 AM on March 18, 2021 [5 favorites]


Also, often in other countries bills are of different sizes depending on their value. Euros, say. The €5 is a small note, the €500 a very big one (physically).
posted by chavenet at 11:29 AM on March 18, 2021


I wish people would stop using the word conniption. You write conniption, but I hear "connipshit" in my head thanks to my dear SO. I can only laugh so much before turning blue and passing out, people.
posted by wierdo at 11:30 AM on March 18, 2021 [3 favorites]


I might have missed it but does this guide mention anywhere that some Americans attempt to solve every problem with a firearm?
posted by drstrangelove at 11:31 AM on March 18, 2021 [2 favorites]


drstrangelove: "I might have missed it but does this guide mention anywhere that some Americans attempt to solve every problem with a firearm?"

Are you suggesting Americans should carry less? Because they couldn't carry less.
posted by chavenet at 11:33 AM on March 18, 2021 [50 favorites]


From a "weird Americanisms" point of view, I agree that the color of our bills is odd. I just also find it odd that someone with normal color vision can look at modern bills and deny that there are color differences when they are pointed out to them, especially with the more obvious ones.
posted by Comet Bug at 11:36 AM on March 18, 2021


Some clarifications:
Manicotti – pasta dish or something that goes with it, maybe cheese
It's basically large (like a 3cm opening) tube pasta stuffed ricotta cheese filling, and baked in tomato sauce. The closest thing might be Canneloni but rounder, with a ricotta cheese filling only, and tomato sauce on top (no additional cheese).

Ziti – see above, but it’s probably pasta
This is just a straight tube-shaped pasta. Think penne but with straight instead of angled ends and about 2x wider in diameter? Sometimes it's a smooth tube, sometimes it has straight lines along the length (Zitti regatte). It's often baked in tomato sauce sometimes with meat and/or ricotta cheese, sometimes with other things.

Garbanzo – bean
Also known as chickpeas.

Crawdad – baby lobster
Crawfish/crayfish

Kielbasa – Sausage, sometimes called a “Polish sausage”
Specifically, a kind of lightly smoked sausage, about 2 feet long (though, usually sold bent in half in a closed U shape).

Tomatillo – baby tomato :) (from Spanish, no one knows if it’s a tomato or a baby)
Not actually a tomato. It's green and it has a leafy husk. The closest thing would be a ground cherry...but it's the size of a small tomato. But then, not everybody knows what a ground cherry is so...you're on your own.

Provolone – cheese
Specifically a round semi-hard cheese. It's usually sliced and put on sandwiches. A slice is about the size of a slice of sandwich bread.

Goober – goofball, fool, someone who’s a bit thick. Typically affectionate. Also a peanut.
In some places this is also an informal term for a gob of spit.
posted by delicious-luncheon at 11:47 AM on March 18, 2021 [2 favorites]


From the “reach out” page:
AT&T (originally Bell Labs) popularized this phrase...
Um what? Is this some kind of MIT in-joke?


No? What would be the joke part of that?
posted by eviemath at 11:54 AM on March 18, 2021


Disagree that the grammar of these two variants necessarily implies any different meaning, even when interpreting literally.

But the actual linguistic history of that saying in the U.S., is that it was commonly said as "you can't eat your cake and have it, too," but underwent an inversion sometime later mid-20th c. that turned it around into "you can't have your cake and eat it too," while not changing the meaning. (Safire wrote an 'On Language' column about this back in the day, that I'm too lazy to look up and cite here, sorry.)

In the first iteration, the conjunctive 'and' is sequential or temporal because of the initial " can not", which is clearly indicating something impossible, i.e., having a food item available after you've already consumed it. The second, more contemporary iteration changes the meaning of that "and" by making it unclear as to whether it indicates a sequence of events or merely a connection between states (having/eating). So I think the inversion of the phrase--its grammar--does clearly create a shift in meaning, but one that is not acknowledged in vernacular practice. To read both settings of that phrase as literally parallel in meaning is post-hoc rationalization, I think. Which just highlights how weird and improvisatory language is, for a system of aural & written symbols with supposedly discrete, specific meaning.
posted by LooseFilter at 11:57 AM on March 18, 2021 [4 favorites]


There's a whole series of books published under the name 'Cultureshock!' [sl amazon] designed for English-speaking ex-pats in a variety of countries, including the USA. I wonder how this list compares.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 12:03 PM on March 18, 2021 [1 favorite]


Note that the list originally linked is Boston-specific. Thus the inclusion, eg., of Allston Christmas.

(In particular, bartleby, Boston does not have malt shoppes. I gather that's a mid-Atlantic region thing? Or maybe just NYC, or just NYC and certain parts of Pennsylvannia near Philadelphia? Or something?)
posted by eviemath at 12:04 PM on March 18, 2021 [2 favorites]


The colors are subtle in some cases, but $1 bills are the only bills that are still the traditional color. The $100, $50, and $10 bills are clearly not green.

Look at Mister Richie Rich rich over here with his fifty dollar bills. Everyone knows there's only two denominations of the US dollar: the $20's that come out of the ATM, and the singles you're left with after you spend them.
posted by pwnguin at 12:18 PM on March 18, 2021 [9 favorites]


Excited about the list of Brit vs US words: oooo data I cried. Typing the numbers in was the wonk of moments. It turns out that a) the sample words are about equivalent to natives [UK words understood by average 92% of UK folk vs 88% US words by USians] b) UK folk are significantly better at clocking US words [average 25%] than the other way round [16%]. I'm putting that down to Friends and The Waltons.
And for parity of esteem with Rock'emSock'em's spoiler list check out one of the comments in the original post [whc is not the original source of the raw data] giving the "solution" to the British words. Another comment there revealed that yob is back-slang, that was news to me, altho the word wasn't.
posted by BobTheScientist at 12:19 PM on March 18, 2021 [1 favorite]


I'm 60 and lived in the US all my life, and the only places I've ever seen malt shops (or "shoppes") are in movies set in the past. My guess is they went out of style in the late 50's or early 60's.
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:19 PM on March 18, 2021 [6 favorites]


Excited about the list of Brit vs US words: oooo data I cried.

One gets the impression that your average Brit doesn't get much pasta or Tex-mex. Nor the typical American get much naan bread.
posted by pwnguin at 12:27 PM on March 18, 2021 [1 favorite]


The second, more contemporary iteration changes the meaning of that "and" by making it unclear as to whether it indicates a sequence of events or merely a connection between states (having/eating).
I remember my mother being very excited about the difference in ordering in that phrase when I was a kid. I still don't understand it. I've never considered "and" part of an ordered sequence, unless it's followed by a "then. . ." As a native English speaker who knows nothing about linguistics except the bits I've been forced to memorize when learning other languages, I genuinely can't tell the difference between the two versions of the cake phrase. I'm having a hard time thinking of examples where "and" refers to ordered events. Maybe "dodge and parry," but that's even more archaic than the phrase in question. Likewise "duck and roll," "run and hide," "go and see." All of which feel like statements I've never heard spoken by a living person.
posted by eotvos at 12:29 PM on March 18, 2021 [1 favorite]


> "I've never considered 'and' part of an ordered sequence, unless it's followed by a 'then. . .'"

It often is, though. Which of these sentences sounds right?

1) I'm going to go to the store and pick up some waffles.
2) I'm going to pick up some waffles and go to the store.
posted by kyrademon at 12:38 PM on March 18, 2021 [3 favorites]


1) I'm going to go to the store and pick up some waffles.
I see your point. Thanks. But, it's also a sentence I'd never say and both sound surprising. "Going to the store to pick up some waffles" or "going to pick up some waffles at the store" would both sound less strange to me.
posted by eotvos at 12:52 PM on March 18, 2021 [1 favorite]


"Dine and dash." "Hit and run."*

It really is a normal construction. I brushed my teeth and rinsed them. I woke up, ate breakfast, and left. "Eats, shoots and leaves."

*Here's a (North?) Americanism: punctuation inside quotes instead of after.
posted by trig at 1:19 PM on March 18, 2021 [2 favorites]


AT&T (originally Bell Labs) popularized this phrase...
Um what? Is this some kind of MIT in-joke?

No? What would be the joke part of that?
Well, Bell Labs was jointly owned by by AT&T and Western Electric, which was itself owned by AT&T. It never did much marketing for itself besides collecting Nobel prizes. So "originally Bell Labs" is just wrong, and gratuitously so.

There was a fair bit of friendly rivalry between Bell Labs and MIT Lincoln Labs way back in the day. But, I dunno. I supposed it might be an in-joke, but if so I admit I don't get it at all.
posted by sjswitzer at 1:21 PM on March 18, 2021 [1 favorite]


Is there a section on "medical bankruptcy"? That's a term not familiar to most of the world.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 1:44 PM on March 18, 2021 [6 favorites]


True, Boston didn't have malt shops; that's kind of an Archie comics thing. Didn't have ice cream parlors, either. That's a bit further west.
Massachusetts had soda fountains. Or a counter at the drugstore.
Or you could just go to gawddam Schrafft's, and get into the only-in-Boston argument of frappe vs milkshake.
posted by bartleby at 2:03 PM on March 18, 2021 [4 favorites]


American here. "Let's go Dutch" to me always had the connotation that "going Dutch" (acting in a Dutch way) meant being fair and sensible versus some aspersion of cheapness on anyone's part. Though I have never deeply considered it until now, I always thought of it this way. Maybe the original term was a slur, but in my headspace it was always mildly complimentary.
posted by SoberHighland at 2:06 PM on March 18, 2021 [3 favorites]


For the boomer generation, the societal expectation was that a man paid for dinner when taking a woman on a date, so "going Dutch" had a whiff of stigma to it - i.e. a man must either be broke, a tightwad, or a cad to not pay for a woman's dinner (this was also the era of women's menus that had no prices listed in them). In these days of somewhat increased social equality, "going Dutch" probably doesn't hold the same sting it once did.
posted by Greg_Ace at 2:26 PM on March 18, 2021 [5 favorites]


(I know my above explanation just skipped over whether or not it was intended as a slur against the Dutch. I didn't intend to ignore or downplay that, I was just addressing "American popular usage at the time" for clarity.)
posted by Greg_Ace at 2:29 PM on March 18, 2021 [1 favorite]


Date format in the US arrrrrrgh.

As an American living in the UK, I am driven to distraction by this: When you ask a British person for, say, a birth date, and they say something like "the fifth of the seventh".

I just want to grab them by the lapels and shake them while shouting "Stop making me count months".
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 2:32 PM on March 18, 2021 [10 favorites]


It really is a normal construction. I brushed my teeth and rinsed them. I woke up, ate breakfast, and left. "Eats, shoots and leaves."

O.k. but it's not the only construction. If we're talking about opportunity costs "You can't go to the concert and the party" isn't different than "you can't go to the party and the concert".
posted by Gygesringtone at 2:33 PM on March 18, 2021 [4 favorites]


For the boomer generation, the societal expectation was that a man paid for dinner when taking a woman on a date, so "going Dutch" had a whiff of stigma to it

That's so funny, I can see that - but as a millennial woman, I always associated the phrase with gender equality, sisters doing it for themselves. Maybe the perspective on whether "dutch" is pejorative is similar, it depends a lot on the individual's opinion of the underlying act of splitting the check.
posted by Emily's Fist at 2:36 PM on March 18, 2021 [1 favorite]


check out one of the comments in the original post [whc is not the original source of the raw data] giving the "solution" to the British words.

Mostly accurate, though tombola is well off; there is a company called 'tombola bingo', so probably a misunderstanding. Tombola is a raffle you have at a village fête or charity fundraiser etc, where some ticket numbers are pre-assigned to small prizes, such as those ending in a 5. You pay to draw a folded ticket from the tombola drum (small box or drum with a door, that spins to shuffle the tickets). Get a winning number, you win either a general prize, or for special tickets (such as 555) you win a 'big' prize. Everyone understands the prizes are invariably tat that's been donated or dredged out the 'random crap' cupboard, it's just an excuse to give your kids a couple of quid to give to the fundraiser. And the tombola is often the highlight of the day. We really are vaguely naff at doing small charity events.
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 3:13 PM on March 18, 2021 [2 favorites]


This is all super informative, and I love the opportunity to view American culture through the lens of someone who is unfamiliar with it. Moreover, many of these comments and anecdotes are golden nuggets I've stashed in my metafilter savings account.

Nevertheless, and I'm sorry if this is a derail, but recent events/American history have me wondering why there isn't a small section on "white supremacy/racism." I realize most of these students will be stuck in the MIT bubble, and TBH, at this point it's a known known, but I have a feeling many of them will experience some of the subtle, and not so subtle American iterations of that (not strictly American) cultural phenomenon. Maybe it's just a given, and knowing about it doesn't help one navigate it any better?
posted by nikoniko at 3:22 PM on March 18, 2021 [3 favorites]


@eotvos: I've moved from a place where casual chatting with strangers means you're about to be scammed to a place where it's rude not to engage... WHERE is this magical place you have moved from??? Is it Finland?
posted by All hands bury the dead at 3:24 PM on March 18, 2021


I’d never before seen this metaphor for friendships. It seems apt enough as a generality.

From the article “The Paradox of American Friendliness”:

“An analogy that has struck a chord with many international students is the comparison of Americans to peaches and many other nationalities to coconuts: Americans are soft on the outside, easy to approach, but the pit is harder — it’s harder to get to know an American really well and to create a real friendship. In contrast, many other nationals may be like coconuts. It is hard to get inside, but once you are there, it is pleasant and you are real friends when you have got through the tough exterior.”

posted by cheapskatebay at 3:45 PM on March 18, 2021 [8 favorites]


O.k. but it's not the only construction. If we're talking about opportunity costs "You can't go to the concert and the party" isn't different than "you can't go to the party and the concert".

Yeah, I was just responding to the idea that "and" doesn't have an accepted sense of "and then" (among others).

To be honest I think "eat your cake and have it too" and "have your cake and eat it too" both make about the same amount of sense logically, if we're interpreting "have" as "keep" or "preserve". But that's a big if: I think the main weirdness comes from the fact that "have" is pretty ambiguous and is often used, specifically in the context of food, to mean eating, or ordering at a restaurant with the purpose of eating -- "I'll have the pancakes", "she had some waffles for lunch" -- and that definition makes the expression nonsensical. Whereas "have" isn't commonly used in the sense of preserving possession.

"Eat your cake and have it too" makes it easier to rule out the have=eat interpretation, so in that sense it helps. But it's still weird; if you're someone who isn't familiar with the expression, it would help to hear something like "keep your cake and eat it" (with that emphasis), or "eat your cake and still have it" (added "still"). But the normal usage of this expression, especially with the flat monotone it's usually delivered in, means that either you'll try to interpret it with have=eat, which leads to a dead end, or you'll start unpacking the logic of the scenario -- it cannot be true that ((there exists a cake in your possession) AND (you eat the cake)) -- and even there the logic doesn't break down, because of course the cake will exist in your possession while you're eating it, so then your imagination will have to move forward in time: it cannot be true that ((there exists a [complete] cake in your possession) AND (you have already eaten [all of] the cake)). At which point you'll have gone beyond the original scenario described by the expression and be left with a firm conviction that this expression is stupid. But you'll probably nonetheless start using it yourself, contributing to the preservation of an interactive annoying experience shared by, quite possibly, billions.

tl;dr: "eat your cake and have it" makes it a little easier to imagine the intended scenario than "have your cake and eat it", but they're both basically equivalent in terms of logic and annoyingness.
posted by trig at 3:48 PM on March 18, 2021


*Here's a (North?) Americanism: punctuation inside quotes instead of after.

It depends. A full stop inside the quotes is correct only if the quote itself is the full sentence.

ie:

"Don't be so pedantic."

He told me not to be "so pedantic".

In the second example, the words before the opening quote are still "waiting" for their full stop, which therefore has to be placed so as to include them in its effect. Only then is the sentence closed and complete. I think that probably applies (and is equally often flouted) on both sides of the Atlantic.

Also, I agree with whoever it was above who said it's more useful to refer to differences in usage as variations rather than mistakes. What's right in one place is wrong in another.
posted by Paul Slade at 4:03 PM on March 18, 2021 [8 favorites]


At least at one point, whether to put the punctuation inside or outside the quotes could also be a matter of which style guide the writer was using. No idea if that's changed since I haven't checked in years.
posted by Greg_Ace at 4:07 PM on March 18, 2021 [2 favorites]


“Commas and periods always go inside the quotation marks in American English; dashes, colons, and semicolons almost always go outside the quotation marks; question marks and exclamation marks sometimes go inside, sometimes stay outside.”

More here.

(With ! and ? it depends on whether the original content has it.)
posted by sjswitzer at 4:43 PM on March 18, 2021 [4 favorites]


He told me not to be "so pedantic".

The great majority of Americans (or at least those who stickle about such things) would reflectively "correct" that to "so pedantic." American-style vs. logical punctuation is a whole thing. It gets worse; in the legal context where precision is key, it would not be at all unusual to write "so pedantic[.]"
posted by Not A Thing at 4:44 PM on March 18, 2021 [1 favorite]


FWIW, I prefer the British quotation style, especially in technical writing where the quoted content might be what you literally need to enter on a keyboard. I was just citing the “rules,” such as they are.
posted by sjswitzer at 4:55 PM on March 18, 2021 [2 favorites]


Yeah, as bartleby references, "Dutch" as a prefix in American idiom dated from the English taking over Manhattan from the Netherlanders in 1664, and sometimes was an implied insult. The anecdote that I'd heard is that "John Cheese" was a snub that English colonists used against Netherlanders, who translated a riposte "Jan Kees" in reply. The etymology is vague but it's mentioned in the Wikipedia article on the word Yankee.
posted by ovvl at 5:03 PM on March 18, 2021 [1 favorite]


Huh, I was wondering if I’d even notice the difference in quotation style and pulled up the first article that came up for The Guardian, and, lo and behold, they pull commas and periods into the quotations. What is even happening‽
posted by sjswitzer at 5:06 PM on March 18, 2021


The Guardian (aka Grauniad) is famously not a particularly good source for authoritative linguistic correctness.
posted by Dysk at 6:00 PM on March 18, 2021 [4 favorites]


Took me a year in the US to discover that "lucking out" is a good thing .... also that "funky" has two meanings (most of the rest of the world only knows "play that funky music white boy")
posted by mbo at 6:06 PM on March 18, 2021 [4 favorites]


Also US geography is weirdly stuck in the 18thC the West is not in the west of the country, and the Midwest is not in the middle of the west (ie about northern California)
posted by mbo at 6:08 PM on March 18, 2021 [2 favorites]


Oh and "park" to mean a place to park your car as "there's a park .... why did you drive past?" That happened for a while until I adjusted
posted by mbo at 6:14 PM on March 18, 2021


The Guardian (aka Grauniad) is famously not a particularly good source for authoritative linguistic correctness.

OK, so I checked the Sun and so far have found no definitive evidence either way, but they don’t even consistently close quotes. What’s up with that?
posted by sjswitzer at 6:38 PM on March 18, 2021


So, it does seem that the Sun (not a paragon of anything good)—when they bother to close quotes at all—puts the period inside of the quotation if it ends the quoted content AND if it ends the containing sentence. But if the containing sentence continues, the period becomes a comma and remains inside the quotes. Not an entirely logical system either.

Again, the British system seems better to me overalll, but I’m not altogether sure what that system actually is.
posted by sjswitzer at 6:55 PM on March 18, 2021 [1 favorite]


Also US geography is weirdly stuck in the 18thC the West is not in the west of the country, and the Midwest is not in the middle of the west

I grew up in Kansas and understood that I was in the “midwest” and that seemed totally sensible to me, so imagine my surprise to learn that Ohio was also midwest.
posted by sjswitzer at 7:00 PM on March 18, 2021 [2 favorites]


My east-coast family thinks that I moved "out west" by relocating to Pittsburgh.
posted by octothorpe at 7:14 PM on March 18, 2021 [7 favorites]


thick as timmies

Look! A wild Canadianism!
posted by soundguy99 at 7:59 PM on March 18, 2021 [8 favorites]


The Guardian (aka Grauniad) is famously not a particularly good source for authoritative linguistic correctness.

It also has a lot of US (and Canadian and Australian) writers, and does a ton of US news coverage. (And yeah, editing is not a priority.)
posted by trig at 9:03 PM on March 18, 2021


I prefer the British quotation style, especially in technical writing where the quoted content might be what you literally need to enter on a keyboard.

And yet they'll blithely include the prompt.

American legal writing also has a strict 'inside quotes only if in the quotation' requirement, which makes sense.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 9:27 PM on March 18, 2021


I grew up in Kansas and understood that I was in the “midwest” and that seemed totally sensible to me, so imagine my surprise to learn that Ohio was also midwest.

When I moved to Texas from the solidly Midwestern state of Michigan, I had multiple people tell me that I was absolutely NOT from the Midwest, that the REAL Midwest was places like Oklahoma, and that I was in fact clearly from the Northeast. And... yeah, no, I want to argue but honestly if words meant anything they'd have been right, that is a bizarre way to define those regions.
posted by nebulawindphone at 9:32 PM on March 18, 2021 [2 favorites]


Also US geography is weirdly stuck in the 18thC the West is not in the west of the country, and the Midwest is not in the middle of the west (ie about northern California)

The west is pretty much everything west of the plains states, but the northwest is like ohio, michigan, illinois, etc. Similarly, the southwest includes arkansas, texas, and sometimes oklahoma, at least in the old parlance that was dominant through the middle 20th century.

That said, the use of the terms is rapidly changing such that the southwest now commonly refers to Arizona, New Mexico, and such (though some use desert southwest for this) and midwest is often used to refer to the plains states.
posted by wierdo at 10:15 PM on March 18, 2021 [1 favorite]


The West is bounded by 30 inches a year to the east and the west -- but that boundary's moving, too.
posted by clew at 11:27 PM on March 18, 2021


also that "funky" has two meanings (most of the rest of the world only knows "play that funky music white boy")

Three, isn't it?
1) relating to funk music ("what a funky bass line")
2) weird, odd, unusual, or somehow off ("that's a funky error message")
3) smelly, rotten, gone off, or otherwise dirty ("okay no, the milk has definitely gotten a bit funky")
posted by Dysk at 11:57 PM on March 18, 2021 [5 favorites]


yeah, probably - having only learned the musical meaning the first time someone told me they were living in a funky house my reaction was "cool" rather than "oh, sad"
posted by mbo at 12:34 AM on March 19, 2021


Another fun cultural thing is ordering a sandwich .... after I'd lived in the US for a while our company was bought by and English one ... we'd go out to lunch with English visitors at the local (CA) deli counter and on purpose keep them busy talking to them in line so they couldn't concentrate on the mechanics of ordering a sandwich and then strand them at the head of the line with far far too many choices ... and then the most confusing thing of all - "do you want everything on it" - where the definition of "everything" is just so full of cultural knowledge
posted by mbo at 12:41 AM on March 19, 2021 [7 favorites]


Funk is just really weird in all the double duty it pulls - it's good time party music, yeah! Also being in a funk means depression.
posted by Dysk at 12:44 AM on March 19, 2021 [4 favorites]


Again, the British system seems better to me overalll, but I’m not altogether sure what that system actually is.

This neatly sums up a lot of British people's instinct - about practically everything.
posted by Paul Slade at 1:04 AM on March 19, 2021 [12 favorites]


We had a great discussion of the meanings of "enquiry" vs "inquiry" - after some research: essentially now days the UK mostly uses them interchangeably, but prefers "enquiry" while the US seems to only use "inquiry" - here in NZ (and Australia) we make a more archaic distinction (now mostly lost elsewhere) "enquiry" to mean a question and "inquiry" to mean an investigation - though I suspect this distinction is fast being lost.

Oh and "pissed" does double duty in the US while in the UK/OZ/NZ differentiate "pissed" and "pissed off"

Of course none of these words are "correct" - there is no one correct english, we're not French, we don't have an Académie - they're just different and we should celebrate them.

Sadly TV/the internet are removing lots of these distinctions, things are becoming more homogeneous, a generation from now many will be gone - I've noticed "lucked out" is starting to be used (correctly) outside the US.

On the upside NZ English is adopting Māori words at a wonderful pace, maybe faster than we're losing many of our unique English ones - and of course the Asian-English hybrids (Singlish et al) that're developing are probably changing faster than any other English dialects at the moment
posted by mbo at 1:34 AM on March 19, 2021 [5 favorites]


The Guardian (aka Grauniad) is famously not a particularly good source for authoritative linguistic correctness.

From what I understand, the Guardian's reputation for sloppy editing comes from the era when editorial was divided behind London and Manchester and carried out by teletype or something equally constrained.
posted by acb at 2:44 AM on March 19, 2021


Oh and "pissed" does double duty in the US while in the UK/OZ/NZ differentiate "pissed" and "pissed off"

Does anyone in the US use “pissed” to mean inebriated? I thought it unambiguously meant annoyed/angry in American English.
posted by acb at 2:47 AM on March 19, 2021 [4 favorites]


also that "funky" has two meanings (most of the rest of the world only knows "play that funky music white boy")

IIRC, the music genre “funk” gets its name from the smell meaning of the word, referring in particular to the smell of sex.

The real-estate meaning of the word “funky” seems to have evolved (at least in Australia) to mean “quirky/trendy in a way that justifies significantly higher prices”, rather than a “rental opportunity” with a bed, hotplate, toilet and rickety ladder in the same room.
posted by acb at 2:54 AM on March 19, 2021 [1 favorite]


From what I understand, the Guardian's reputation for sloppy editing comes from the era when editorial was divided behind London and Manchester and carried out by teletype or something equally constrained.

Yeah, but they're still at it these days, at least on the Web, I assume for the same reason the BBC and lots of others are terrible on their websites - a focus on speed and a lack of skilled copy editors.
posted by Dysk at 3:16 AM on March 19, 2021 [1 favorite]


The mention of "pitch black*" as an idiom reminded me: when my son first learned it, he generalized "pitch" as an all-purpose intensifier of colors. He would talk about pitch red, pitch blue, etc. It was charming.

Except during meltdowns when his very specific artistic vision was not realized by our crayons or markers. "That's not the right red! It needs to be pitch red!"

*Here it's pitch black, pitch dark sounds crazy to me.
posted by medusa at 4:55 AM on March 19, 2021 [6 favorites]


the Midwest is not in the middle of the west

This undid me as a child. I remember getting frustrated to the point of near tears in 5th grade that my hometown (in western North Carolina) was due south of Ohio on a map, and yet somehow I was supposed to believe that Ohio was "midwest." That Ohio was considered "midwest" but by that same logic neither Kentucky nor Oklahoma were considered "midwest" broke my brain.
posted by thivaia at 7:07 AM on March 19, 2021 [1 favorite]


Much of the South is also north of the main population centers of the West, including northern California.

The Northeast is in the northeast, but other than that everything is more of a label than a direction.
posted by ardgedee at 7:12 AM on March 19, 2021


Trust those Yankees to get it all wrong...
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:39 AM on March 19, 2021


I've lived overseas for more than a decade now. There is a pretty consistent list of things that people regularly ask me about or are surprised to learn: The difference between a couple and a few; what a dime is; what is up with dates / inches / pounds; that prisoners and felons often can't vote; how expensive healthcare / university is; if I owned a gun; why we switch to German when someone sneezes; why Americans are so friendly.
posted by Nothing at 10:23 AM on March 19, 2021 [3 favorites]


My husband (American) and I (Canadian immigrant) had a conversation the other night about "west" because I was writing postcards for Flip the West, and he humourously asked me if I was sure it wasn't a Republican organization, since the West is already pretty Democratic, and I replied that the postcards were going to Texas and he said, "ah, the old west-as-defined-by-your-relationship-to-the-Mississippi definition of 'west'."
posted by joannemerriam at 10:30 AM on March 19, 2021 [6 favorites]


Does anyone in the US use “pissed” to mean inebriated? I thought it unambiguously meant annoyed/angry in American English.

You're probably right. I use "pissed" to mean "inebriated" and when I do so, my American friends invariably look confused and ask me what's wrong. For this reason, I have switched to using "faced" instead since it's unambiguous (people who don't know what it means seems to be able to get it from context).
posted by joannemerriam at 10:32 AM on March 19, 2021 [2 favorites]


European vs. American date format eccentricities infiltrate user interface design, at least in one example I can think of that still trips me up. I have a Nord keyboard, made by the Swedish company Clavia. It can play four different categories of instrument sounds: pianos, electric pianos, organs and sampled sounds. Its small, red LED screen displays a numeric representation of what sound you've selected to play.

4 kinds of sounds.
Room for up to 32 of each of those kinds of sounds, depending on the size of the sound file.
So, picture a file cabinet with 4 drawers, and room in each drawer for 32 files.

I want to play one of the organ patches I saved, so I press the 3 button because organs are in the third group on my keyboard. Then I use up/down arrow buttons to select organ #2.

What does the LED screen display? 3.2, right? Drawer #3 in the file cabinet , file #2 in that drawer?

No, no, no. It displays 2.3. I can't tell you how many times I've been on stage and forgotten that the Swedes like to do it backwards.
posted by emelenjr at 11:23 AM on March 19, 2021


being in a funk means depression

Or cowardice. The many faces of funk.
posted by clew at 12:40 PM on March 19, 2021


I'm curious what you call it instead of gazumping, because it is rage inducing.

Not sure we have a word as specific, and I don't think it's exactly the same meaning, but I'd use "bait and switch."

I had never heard of "gazumping" before, but the word I would use as an American in that situation is "renege".
posted by jomato at 12:57 PM on March 19, 2021 [2 favorites]


Words:
I've never heard gazumping, but I bet that you could steal a term from video gaming and a lot of people would get it - Gank.
A portmanteau of grab + yank (as in pull quickly). Dude! I went through that whole boss fight to get the special item he drops, then you respawned at the right moment and ganked it right out from under me! Not cool! If I'm expecting to win the auction, but a last minute high bidder takes it away, I got ganked.

Funk, like fug, is a cloud of smell. When a band says they are going to bring the funk, they mean that they are going to make everyone dance and sweat until this dance hall / club smells like a locker room. 'I could tell this room was your son's, it has that funk of Teenage Boy'.
Old: When one is 'in a (blue) funk', they are depressed or demoralized or in a mood - ever see a cartoon, where the character is sitting on a log with their chin in their hands, and their thought bubble is just a black scribble? 'I got ganked on eBay for something I really wanted, now I'm in a funk about it'.
Not sure how that became 'cool, quirky or unusual' over time - 'Oh, I love those Shrek earrings, they're so funky!', but that happens to words.
Rare: the second most popular publisher of dictionaries in the US for a long time was Funk & Wagnall. Another way to say 'put that (unpleasant truth) in your pipe and smoke it' was for a time 'put that in your Funk and Wagnall's!' Because it lets you get satisfyingly close to saying 'Fuckin'.

Pissed means angry, not drunk, in the US. But we do understand 'past tense of nonsense word' as extremely drunk or high. So just make something up and add -ed. 'We spent the whole weekend snozzlemoofed on margaritas and cheap weed', 'this guy came up to us - he was totally bedoinked on something, I dunno what - and started explaining time travel and aliens'.

For folk etymologies - and back to slurs!- I prefer the one that's much simpler than John Cheese. Since they didn't quite fit in with the elitist Cavaliers of the Virginia plantations, nor the rigid puritanical Roundheads of the Massachusetts colonies, the folks between them took some mockery from them. They'd roll their eyes and say 'oh, look who's coming, it's Johnny Dutchman'. But they wouldn't say Johnny, they'd use the Dutch form - Janke or Janneke, little John or Jane. But we don't spell that sound with a J; in English, you'd use a Y. Yonk-uh. And if you see it written, you're likely to pronounce that -uh as -ee, so you start spelling it that way; same with the first -a sound, it's -an, not -on. So those people who had settled the Hudson River Valley and New Amsterdam started getting called...Yankees. Jankes.
But their plain speaking, thrift, and clever effeciency were seen as virtues up north; and New Englanders started adopting terms like 'Yankee Ingenuity' with pride. Eventually Mark Twain writes a time travel book about a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and the game is over.
posted by bartleby at 2:41 PM on March 19, 2021 [7 favorites]


I guess a scrivener would know.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 5:58 PM on March 19, 2021 [5 favorites]


I grew up in Kansas and understood that I was in the “midwest” and that seemed totally sensible to me, so imagine my surprise to learn that Ohio was also midwest

As a native Coloradan this one always bugged me too - the geographical center of the contiguous US is so obviously in Kansas.

Much of the South is also north of the main population centers of the West, including northern California.

Derail, but do you mean southern California? San Francisco is at 37° N, which runs directly through WV and through the very tops of Kentucky and Virginia. Pretty much all of the South is still south of that. I believe it's true that the SoCal/AZ region is the biggest concentration of people in the west, and that's definitely south of big chunks of the "South." But I'd point out that many population centers of the South are actually south of California's southern border.

In terms of the Britishisms vs. Americanisms word charts, people have already pointed out a couple ringers that are just spelled differently, so I'd add to those that "kerbside" seems to mean and be pronounced the same as "curbside," which I'd assume most Americans would recognize.
posted by aspersioncast at 6:09 PM on March 19, 2021


I'm fairly sure gank comes from gangsta rap, and probably precedes modern gamer culture.
posted by acb at 6:15 PM on March 19, 2021


I guess a scrivener would know.

Yeah, but he'd prefer not to.
posted by kaibutsu at 6:35 PM on March 19, 2021 [12 favorites]


No, no, no. It displays 2.3. I can't tell you how many times I've been on stage and forgotten that the Swedes like to do it backwards.

Note you know how programmers feel whenever they come accross a (big|little) endian system, when obviously any sane person intuitively thinks in (big|little) endian.
posted by Dysk at 12:18 AM on March 20, 2021


Regarding the "eat your cake and have it" discussion above, the expression was used so often in the last few years in English speaking Europe, that it’s simply referred to as “cakeism”. As in “that request is sheer cakeism”, which makes even less sense.

but the word I would use as an American in that situation is "renege"

Depends a bit on who’s the focus of your ire. The seller has reneged, the new buyer is gazumping. (It’s also more specific- a seller can renege for a lot of different reasons.)
posted by scorbet at 3:42 AM on March 20, 2021


naan bread

This, along with "chai tea," is one of my biggest linguistic pet peeves. Naan means bread! Chai means tea! I'm sure other cultures have similar frustrations about the ways their foods are linguistically cannibalized by the colonizing tongue.

Was "kerbside" common in the UK before the pandemic? I never heard "curbside" to mean contactless takeout/pickup before about a year ago. It used to mean "informal/off the record question, not worth a formal consultation that would take hours."
posted by basalganglia at 5:10 AM on March 20, 2021


It used to mean "informal/off the record question, not worth a formal consultation that would take hours."

I couldn't tell from the comment, are you saying that this was the predominant British usage (which I have no prior knowledge to comment on one way or another) of kerbside, or that this was the predominant American usage of curbside (in which case, what?! I have never heard that use before).
posted by eviemath at 6:38 AM on March 20, 2021


(To clarify: I've heard curbside used to refer to the literal curb at the side of the road. So curbside pickup references the location of the pickup, but needs the "pickup" addition to refer specifically to pickup. You might also or instead have a curbside lemonade stand, or a curbside dance party, or curbside drop-off at the airport or train/bus station.)
posted by eviemath at 6:41 AM on March 20, 2021


"Gank" in the slang form dates back to the early 90s at least. I assumed it had its origins in AAVE in SoCal because that's how I first heard it, but I'd love to see a source. I've also always assumed it made its way into gamer slang via gangsta rap, like the thankfully waning prevalence of suburban white kids calling each other the N word online.

A charming Mid-Atlantic variant of the curbside drop-off is the "kiss-and-ride," which basically means a place to drop someone off at public transit. The sign still makes me smile. See also "speed hump," which seems to be interchangeable with what I'd call a speed *bump*. I've never seen either usage outside the Mid-Atlantic, so curious to find out if these are common anywhere else.
posted by aspersioncast at 9:38 AM on March 20, 2021 [1 favorite]


I have a similar recollection of gank predating online games. I'm not sure it has always been that way, but speed hump and speed bump refer to differently shaped/sized structures. A speed hump is in between a speed bump and a speed table.
posted by wierdo at 10:06 AM on March 20, 2021


I couldn't tell from the comment, are you saying that this was the predominant British usage (which I have no prior knowledge to comment on one way or another) of kerbside, or that this was the predominant American usage of curbside (in which case, what?! I have never heard that use before).

The latter. It's like a "hey does this sound right to you" validation of your gut response to a situation, but aimed at someone with a particular area of expertise rather than a true peer. Maybe it's specific to (American) medicine? I've never worked in any other field and have no life outside my job (especially these days), so not sure if other professions do this too.
posted by basalganglia at 10:10 AM on March 20, 2021


aspersioncast, I’ve seen a kiss-and-ride sign at a Bay Area BART station. But it’s an unusual enough name to cause a startled reaction from the non-kissing acquaintance I was meeting there.
posted by clew at 11:19 AM on March 20, 2021


See also "speed hump," which seems to be interchangeable with what I'd call a speed *bump*.

I think they have slightly different shapes? With a speed table being yet another variation? Wikipedia seems to confirm this.
posted by eviemath at 6:51 PM on March 20, 2021


basalganglia, I can't really speak to most industries, but it does sound perhaps like a specific-to-medicine usage? I had to specifically search "curbside consultation" to find links for the medical term. It's a usage that also makes sense, though; and I got to learn something new!
posted by eviemath at 6:59 PM on March 20, 2021 [1 favorite]


I bought a speed table to help me slow down my eating at dinner time.
posted by Greg_Ace at 7:21 PM on March 20, 2021 [1 favorite]


...so I ended up eating in my easy chair. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
posted by Greg_Ace at 7:30 PM on March 20, 2021


I really never considered that a dime doesn't say how many cents its worth...
posted by subdee at 9:21 PM on March 20, 2021


naan bread

This, along with "chai tea," is one of my biggest linguistic pet peeves.


Yeah, there are innumerable examples of this, e.g. “shrimp scampi”, but the thing that tickikes me is an etymologically self-contradictory expression like “gym clothes.”
posted by sjswitzer at 9:32 PM on March 20, 2021 [1 favorite]


Yeah, there are innumerable examples of this, e.g. “shrimp scampi”

Scampi aren't shrimp!
posted by Dysk at 1:32 AM on March 21, 2021 [1 favorite]


This, along with "chai tea," is one of my biggest linguistic pet peeves.

It seems practically inevitable when languages acquire new words. Even if the Hindi or Urdu words naan mean "bread," the (American) English word naan doesn't. If you're speaking English, saying naan bread isn't any different from saying pumpernickel bread.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 5:41 AM on March 21, 2021 [1 favorite]


I really never considered that a dime doesn't say how many cents its worth...


It just seems so centsless, doesn't it?
posted by a non mouse, a cow herd at 5:57 AM on March 21, 2021 [4 favorites]


If you're speaking English, saying naan bread isn't any different from saying pumpernickel bread.

It's less like "pumpernickel bread" and more like saying "bagel bread." There's a qualitative difference that I can't exactly explain. Perhaps it's a necessary transitional stage of introducing an immigrant/minority cuisine to the dominant culture. It really grates, though.
posted by basalganglia at 6:34 AM on March 21, 2021


There's a qualitative difference that I can't exactly explain.

In English, the "bread" is arguably still redundant because there aren't naan telephones or naan eyeglasses, just like there aren't pita grapes or tuna chairs. But this is something that doesn't depend on the word's etymology -- naan could mean "grandmother" or "tax form" in Hindi or Urdu and that wouldn't change the redundancy of "bread" in English.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 7:32 AM on March 21, 2021 [1 favorite]


But back to Going Dutch. It's just separate checks for each person. But the concept, I think, becomes an important Americanism. I don't know if this relates to actual people living in the Netherlands, but the Dutch early colonists had a reputation as being 1) tight with money 2) blunt to the point other peoples found them rude, and 3) almost totally disinterested in the protocols and rituals of social hierarchy.

These are certainly things the contemporary Dutch think about ourselves.
posted by atrazine at 8:06 AM on March 21, 2021 [3 favorites]


One more use of the word "dime" -- in basketball, it's shorthand for an assist.
posted by leftover_scrabble_rack at 10:50 AM on March 21, 2021


In U.S. English, chai definitely doesn’t mean tea. Chai is tea with milk, sugar, cardamom, and other spices. You wouldn’t refer to plain tea as chai. I assume there’s a different word for the milky sweet spicy stuff in places where chai is used to mean tea.
posted by chrchr at 11:24 AM on March 21, 2021


I stand happily corrected on the origins of 'gank'. While I'm at it, I thank AAVE for coming up with 'yeet', the perfect antonym to 'yoink'.
posted by bartleby at 11:33 AM on March 21, 2021


chrchr, my parents are Indian. I am very aware of what chai is. It's the only way tea is served in South Asian homes; there isn't any other word for it (it's really curious that you assume there would be!), and there is also no word for American-style tea (black, from a bag, no milk, spices, or sugar) because you would never serve tea that way. I suppose you could ask for it that way, but you would get very weird looks.

And don't get me started on the triply redundant "chai tea latte!"

I just look forward to the day when restaurants in the US can just put "naan" and "chai" on the menu, when those words will be as integrated into American culture and cuisine as much as "pizza" and "bagel."
posted by basalganglia at 1:57 PM on March 21, 2021 [3 favorites]


But "pizza bagels" can go straight to hell.
posted by Greg_Ace at 4:06 PM on March 21, 2021 [1 favorite]


But... when you put pizza on a bagel...
posted by showbiz_liz at 4:15 PM on March 21, 2021 [4 favorites]


I just look forward to the day when restaurants in the US can just put "naan" and "chai" on the menu,

Maybe it's just because I live in NYC but, every Indian restaurant I've been to DOES just say naan. TBH in my experience "naan bread" is more of a British-ism than an American-ism!
posted by showbiz_liz at 4:17 PM on March 21, 2021 [3 favorites]


I apologize. I was wrong to assume. Thank you for taking the time to correct me.
posted by chrchr at 4:18 PM on March 21, 2021 [1 favorite]


Not to traumatise people, but I went to a cafe here in Aus once, and asked for a chai latte, and they gave me a flavoured coffee latte.
posted by Marticus at 5:06 PM on March 21, 2021 [5 favorites]


Quick question then: does 'masala tea' not at all figure in the cafe/deli landscape? That's basically what chai is for us, and it's probably worked out that way in the local english because we have competing tea traditions (chinese v indian v southeast asian which is more chinese but also sugared v english).
posted by cendawanita at 5:09 PM on March 21, 2021 [1 favorite]


cendawanita -- I haven't heard/seen the term masala tea/masala chai in the US. That would be a much more reasonable term! Masala meaning spice blend, so it actually works as a descriptor/modifier on the word "tea." And also when you have differing tea cultures, it's important to specify which one you mean. (I vividly remember the first time I went to a sit-down Chinese restaurant as a child and was completely bewildered by green tea in little handle-less cups!)
posted by basalganglia at 6:14 PM on March 21, 2021 [1 favorite]


I think in the early days of it becoming something you could get at a US coffee place, it was called 'masala chai'. That's too many syllables, so people just called it 'chai' at the service counter.
Then when their friend asked what was that new thing you just ordered, they'd explain it as 'a kind of tea, with milk and Indian spices'. Their friend said 'oh, that sounds good, I'll have a chai tea as well, please'.

At some point, 'Chai' started referring to the masala spice flavor profile, forgetting the underlying tea. I imagine these days one could find something like 'chai ice cream', which may not have any tea in it; it's plain ice cream that instead of vanilla, is flavored with the blend of cardamom, etc.
So in the US, when people say chai, they mean masala chai flavoured; they might be surprised to learn that tea is involved.

I'm trying to think of how naan is listed? We mess with it, so a menu is likely to have Naan, Garlic Naan, Keema Naan; variants. I bet that someplace where a lot of their customers are not familiar with Indian food at all, the menu would read something like "Naan (flatbread)". Eventually we'll get around to 'do you want naan with that?' at the drive thru. Give us time.
posted by bartleby at 6:21 PM on March 21, 2021 [3 favorites]




Naan, Garlic Naan, Keema Naan ...

...Banana Naan...
posted by Greg_Ace at 7:01 PM on March 21, 2021 [2 favorites]


doot doo, doot doo doo
posted by bartleby at 7:05 PM on March 21, 2021 [11 favorites]


I would favorite that twice if I could. 👍
posted by Greg_Ace at 7:58 PM on March 21, 2021 [1 favorite]


Quick question then: does 'masala tea' not at all figure in the cafe/deli landscape? That's basically what chai is for us, and it's probably worked out that way in the local english because we have competing tea traditions (chinese v indian v southeast asian which is more chinese but also sugared v english).

In the Middle East / Gulf, at least around 2000 this is how I would order it. Similar sort of confluence but then between:
-European: black tea as the default
-English: tea with milk, possibly with sugar. English "builder's tea" is basically Indian tea but without spices (very appropriate really)
-Mint tea which I think of as very Moroccan but I think is common throughout North Africa
-Turkish style tea which is similar to continental European or Russian ways of serving but generally stronger

I still find it confusing to see on the menu here in England because "chai" just means tea in Russian as well.

Now everything has been very starbucks-ised so we are treated to the spectacle of an Indian expat ordering a drink from a Filipino barista that has the word "chai" in the name and receiving a drink that was designed by American food scientists.
posted by atrazine at 4:40 AM on March 22, 2021 [1 favorite]


The mismatch in the Brit/Am use of "tabled" actually makes sense when you look at the layout of the House of Commons vs the House of Representatives.

In Parliament, there is a central table that MPs approach. They lay any materials they wish to read from on a couple of old riveted boxes, and address the speaker. The table is where the topic at hand is discussed.

In Congress, the representatives speak from the floor, and the metaphorical table is somewhere off to the side.

I have used "you have the floor" in a UK meeting context and got a couple slightly confused looks before they worked it out. It's apparently standard in Robert's Rules of Order and all that, but it isn't quite as widely understood as it is in the US.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 5:57 AM on March 22, 2021 [6 favorites]


(Side note: a latte is a coffee beverage with espresso plus steamed milk. And despite not having necessarily an espresso tradition, Americans tend to be more serious about their coffee than their tea. So yeah, a "chai tea latte" would be better named a masala latte, but either way it's definitely going to be a coffee drink. The "tea" in there is still part of the expression "chai tea" (for better or worse), not a modifier on "latte".)
posted by eviemath at 6:24 AM on March 22, 2021


(Which kind of breaks one of the unwritten rules of adjective precedence in English, as I understand it, which is why "chai tea latte" is indeed a confusing name.)
posted by eviemath at 6:40 AM on March 22, 2021


(Of course, since Americans sometimes like to reinvent the wheel and call it something else, since the introduction of chai tea lattes, other tea lattes, as non-coffee drinks, have become a thing. Despite the fact that they already existed and most of the rest of the former British colonies just called them milk tea. /shrug/ So I somewhat take back my first comment in this thread - I would mostly expect a chai tea latte at most specialty fancy coffee shops to be a coffee beverage. Especially since the just tea version is already just what a chai, or chai tea, is. But if "tea lattes" as non-coffee beverages become more popular, likely usage for chai tea lattes in particular will shift over to becoming just what chai originally meant... now with not one but two extraneous modifiers!)
posted by eviemath at 6:48 AM on March 22, 2021


Wikipedia disagrees: "Variants include... replacing the coffee with another drink base such as masala chai (spiced Indian tea)..."

Which is always how I've intuitively understood "chai (tea) latte" (never ordered or drunk one). It's just a masala tea with pretentions, made with steamed milk.
posted by Dysk at 9:48 AM on March 22, 2021


eviemath - are you saying that Americans would generally expect "chai tea latte" to be a coffee drink? I definitely disagree - that's what the term "dirty chai" is for. Dirty chais involve espresso, chai tea lattes do not.
posted by mosst at 9:53 AM on March 22, 2021 [2 favorites]


(didn't see Dysk's comment before posting - whoops!)
posted by mosst at 9:54 AM on March 22, 2021


I’ve seen a kiss-and-ride sign at a Bay Area BART station

Really? I lived in Oakland for a decade and now I'm wondering if I'm just not very observant or if that's new.
posted by aspersioncast at 3:20 PM on March 22, 2021


I don't think I've ever seen a kiss-and-ride sign in California; they're usually referred to as "park-and-ride" around here.
posted by suelac at 3:32 PM on March 22, 2021


I haven’t been on BART for nearly a decade - Ashby had one and surprised my friend, and Balboa Park has had one, according to Google.

Maybe they’ve been renamed for ridesharing! That would make more sense this decade! they’re pause-and-drop-off-passenger, different from a park-and-ride.
posted by clew at 4:02 PM on March 22, 2021 [1 favorite]


The white zone is for immediate loading and unloading of passengers only. There is no stopping in the red zone.
posted by Huffy Puffy at 4:21 PM on March 22, 2021 [7 favorites]


Look Betty, don't start up with your white zone shit again.
posted by Greg_Ace at 4:46 PM on March 22, 2021 [9 favorites]


See also "station wagon".
posted by clew at 4:47 PM on March 22, 2021


They're for ferrying people and baggage to and from the train station.
Station Wagon. What's the question?
Were people driving around the council housing estate in their Volvo 245 'estate wagons'? Or were they more a Downtown Abbey type 'estate' thing?
posted by bartleby at 10:33 PM on March 22, 2021


They're not "estate wagons", they're just "estates".
posted by Dysk at 11:01 PM on March 22, 2021 [1 favorite]


I don't think I've ever seen a kiss-and-ride sign in California; they're usually referred to as "park-and-ride" around here.

At least in Boston, we've got both of these with different implied behaviors. "Park-and-ride" is for pulling into a parking spot, turning your car off, getting out of it, and getting on the train. "Kiss-and-ride" is for briefly putting your foot on the brake pedal, letting your passenger out of the car so that they can get on the train, and then driving away to let the next car in.
posted by nebulawindphone at 6:50 AM on March 23, 2021 [2 favorites]


Station wagons haven't really existed in a while. They've been replaced by SUVs and CUVs.
posted by octothorpe at 7:04 AM on March 23, 2021


Station wagons haven't really existed in a while. They've been replaced by SUVs and CUVs.

I initially read this to mean that, at some point, all station wagons stopped existing, like we'd had some kind of station wagon rapture, and the implications of the Station Wagon Rapture still haunt us as we tool around in our S/CUVs (why? where did they go? why STATION WAGONS??).
posted by LooseFilter at 7:12 AM on March 23, 2021 [6 favorites]


why STATION WAGONS??

They know what they did.
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:16 AM on March 23, 2021 [6 favorites]


Station wagons never really die; they just go sit in the way-back.
posted by bartleby at 11:27 AM on March 23, 2021 [5 favorites]


I'd like coffee with milk, café au lait, and a caffe latte, please.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 12:42 PM on March 23, 2021 [2 favorites]


*splits half a cup of black coffee 3 ways, adds a buttload of milk and sugar to top them off

blecch
posted by Greg_Ace at 1:31 PM on March 23, 2021


I'd like coffee with milk, café au lait, and a caffe latte, please.

When I was a barrista, these were all prepared differently.

Coffee with milk: Here's your cup of coffee. Cold milk is over at the condiment station. You have your choice of Skim, 2%, Whole. (It's been a long time since I slung coffee.)

Cafe au lait: Half hot coffee, half steamed milk. Here ya go!

Cafe latte: 1 to shots espresso. Steamed milk almost to the top. Froth (NOT FOAM! If your getting something that tastes like foam on top, someone made it wrong) on top.

Variations on a theme? Sure. I would still argue they are all different drinks. I would also argue the cup of "coffee" I have from my Keurig every morning is really closer to an Americano than a (US) standard cup of drip coffee.
posted by a non mouse, a cow herd at 5:22 PM on March 23, 2021 [7 favorites]


I once submitted a non mouse, a cow herd's explanation as a lateral thinking puzzle to the Futility Closet Podcast. Either Sharon Ross answered it too quickly or not at all, as I never heard it on the show (unless perhaps it appeared in the patreon content? I still haven't set up patreon for anything).
The setup was basically "Someone says the same three words in three different languages, gets three different things in response, and walks away satisfied."
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 2:55 AM on March 24, 2021 [1 favorite]


I spent *way* too long trying to process "a non mouse, a cow herd's explanation" as a puzzle meeting the description given.

... clearly I need more coffee.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 7:54 AM on March 24, 2021 [4 favorites]


you are not alone
posted by nebulawindphone at 8:59 AM on March 24, 2021 [1 favorite]


I'm adding CUV to the list of horrible things metafilter has taught me have names. Thanks. I mean that sincerely.
posted by eotvos at 9:23 AM on March 24, 2021


It's worth reminding people that coffee culture, and coffee language is actually different in different parts of the US (and then there's Starbucks - who even redefine 'large')
posted by mbo at 11:31 AM on March 24, 2021


The first time I ordered tea in the US (note: in Tennessee, so the South) I was at someplace like an IHOP or similar restaurant, and told my then-boyfriend Southerner I was planning to order something-or-other (I forget what I ate) and tea. He'd seen me drink tea in Canada so he knew what I wanted was hot unsweetened tea with milk in it, so he told me to order that. The waitress looked confused, asked if I was sure, wrote down my order, and then brought me a cup of hot water, a tea bag, and a glass of milk.
posted by joannemerriam at 2:44 PM on March 24, 2021


I grew up in the south. Getting hot water and a teabag is pretty standard thing when ordering hot tea, and usually you'd get a couple of those little tubs of cream or artificial creamer unless you specifically asked for milk. (minus the confusion, though; that was weird)
posted by Greg_Ace at 3:12 PM on March 24, 2021 [2 favorites]


It was really the full glass of milk that made this stick out in mind. Getting hot water and a tea bag isn't unusual in Canada either (though usually the hot water comes in a little metal teapot with a lid). I live here now and just order hot tea without milk and it's fine.
posted by joannemerriam at 3:36 PM on March 24, 2021


and then there's Starbucks - who even redefine 'large'

@mbo Are you saying Grande should be called the Italian version of medium, since there is only one size smaller than that?

I may have forgotten some details, so take with a grain of salt... At one time, there were only three(!) sizes of drinks (all hot, IIRC) you could order:
1. Short (6 oz?)
2. Tall (12?)
3. Grande (16)

So, at the time, Grande actually was large. Short disappeared due to lack of sales. Although, I am told, for several years later you could still get a short on request and they also kept producing the short cups to give kids a free little hot chocolate.

I think short was discontinued before Venti (20 oz) and lost to the memory of times so once Venti had been established for a while, it did look odd that what's really the medium is actually called large.

I haven't been to a Starbucks in a long time (and when I do go I always just get a Venti Drip with a few ice cubes, so don't even look at the menu), but they also had, or may still have, a Trenta (30 oz!).

Relatedly, my cafeteria at work has two sizes for fountain sodas: 20 and 32 oz. They call the 20 oz "medium" and it drives me crazy.
posted by a non mouse, a cow herd at 4:25 PM on March 24, 2021


You can still totally get a “short” at Starbucks. It’s even in the app!
posted by chrchr at 4:29 PM on March 24, 2021 [1 favorite]


They call the 20 oz "medium" and it drives me crazy.

The existence of a small is implied, but not its availability.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 6:11 PM on March 24, 2021 [5 favorites]


Calling 20 oz. of beverage "small" would drive me crazy.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 9:24 AM on March 25, 2021 [1 favorite]


Calling 20 oz. of beverage "small" would drive me crazy.

I know! At the movies a small is at least 32 ounces!
(remember the movies? sigh)
posted by Mchelly at 9:52 AM on March 25, 2021


> Calling 20 oz. of beverage "small" would drive me crazy.

Bear in mind that cup will be filled to the brim with ice, so your actual amount of drink will be ~10 oz., which I'd be fine with calling 'small'.
posted by hydra77 at 1:26 PM on March 25, 2021 [1 favorite]


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