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Ey up miduck, clean ya tabs and gerra mash on, I'm well nesh.
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Dec 19, 2020 22:06
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My favourite Britishism is 'fortnight' (fourteen nights, ie, two weeks). I had no idea when I visited the US that this word effectively no longer exists over there, and sounds nearly as antique to speakers of American English as 'sennight' (seven nights, which is not a word many people would now recognise here in the UK) -- 'Aye, Sirrah, 'tis wellnigh a fortnight since I set foote in this your beauteous land.' 'Bugger' and 'sod' are the most British expletives. We invoke bumsex at the slightest inconvenience, or when something breaks, or when we're envious ('lucky sod'), or when we want to genuinely sympathise with someone's plight ('poor bugger'). OTOH 'oval office' is still a very serious insult over here.
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Dec 19, 2020 22:30
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"Knocked Down" by a car as opposed to "Run Over". Which to me is the difference of someone getting knocked out of their shoes and having their ribs crushed by the grill, head cracking the pavement, before one set of wheels then another mangles the body - if you're lucky, otherwise you get hooked by the undercarriage and dragged till enough of you has been grated off you can slide loose or the drunk driver pulls into a Maccas drive-thru, whichever comes first. versus, like: :max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():format(webp)/cat-baby-59036a5f3df78c54560e2f4b.gif) "Knocked down" Also 'Maccas' Also pædophiles, with an æ, like they're frickin Aristophanes or something. Carnival of Shrews posted:My favourite Britishism is 'fortnight' (fourteen nights, ie, two weeks). I had no idea when I visited the US that this word effectively no longer exists over there, and sounds nearly as antique to speakers of American English as 'sennight' (seven nights, which is not a word many people would now recognise here in the UK) -- I mean, people know it, but like, it's the default word to use when you're joking around talking old-timey. Part of how Americans understand the word to be defined is that no one actually uses it in conversation. Just like no one pluralizes 'Mothers in Law' or 'Attorneys General' or whatever 'correctly' unless they're trying to get a laugh out of someone for being deliberately archaically twee. https://www.theonion.com/william-safire-orders-two-whoppers-junior-1819565735 Also just now learning 'sod' is somehow related to anal sex and not dirt, which seems like a perfectly acceptable insulting thing to compare someone to. PipHelix has a new favorite as of 01:24 on Dec 20, 2020 |
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Dec 20, 2020 01:15
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Sodomite, I believe.
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Dec 20, 2020 01:46
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It's based off "night soil" which is human feces as fertilizer worded politely. Sticking your dick in a butt is as poor a substitute for sex as night soil is for proper sod. Medieval people had weird ideas about everything and Englishmen have been generally been backwards about most things.
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Dec 20, 2020 04:10
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Washing-up liquid.
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Dec 21, 2020 22:43
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Do americans have cubby holes? Also do you know where the parson's nose is on a chicken?
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Dec 21, 2020 23:16
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After a careful consideration, I have decided not to proceed forward with my application to procure Gregg's sausage rolls as it looked pretty dodgy.
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Dec 21, 2020 23:31
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OwlFancier posted:Do americans have cubby holes? We don't even know what a parson is. Southerners might. My favorite: Godziller
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Dec 21, 2020 23:38
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OwlFancier posted:Do americans have cubby holes? Sure, that's the same as the Pope's Nose. Do British chickens have oysters?
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Dec 22, 2020 00:55
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gleebster posted:Sure, that's the same as the Pope's Nose. Do British chickens have oysters? Probably? Though I admit I don't think I've ever seen them done separate or anything.
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Dec 22, 2020 01:26
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VinylonUnderground posted:It's based off "night soil" which is human feces as fertilizer worded politely. Sticking your dick in a butt is as poor a substitute for sex as night soil is for proper sod. Medieval people had weird ideas about everything and Englishmen have been generally been backwards about most things. Ah yes, the English, the only homophobic people in medieval times.
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Dec 22, 2020 03:34
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I remember hearing a British guy say rubber somewhere and I was like that can't be what he meant.
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Dec 22, 2020 03:40
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knife_of_justice posted:Washing-up liquid. fairy liquid
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Dec 22, 2020 04:54
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Do Americans really not say fortnight? So common here in upsy downy prison land (Australia) too
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Dec 22, 2020 06:46
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RenegadeStyle1 posted:I remember hearing a British guy say rubber somewhere and I was like that can't be what he meant. Contextually it could mean either an eraser or a condom.
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Dec 22, 2020 07:29
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VinylonUnderground posted:It's based off "night soil" which is human feces as fertilizer worded politely. You wot? It's from Sodom and Gomorrah, in spite of the niggle that nowhere in the Old Testament does it say that anal sex was the reason why God smote those places (I think the men there tried to rape any strangers unwise enough to visit? It's a long time since I've read the story). More Brit stuff: rhyming slang is still a thing over here. Not to the extent that it was in its Cockney heyday, but it's around. When I looked for lists of rhyming slang some of them were too obscure for me to recognise, or gave the impression that everyone over here talks like they're in Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, but I knew most of the ones on the Wikipedia page for rhyming slang, even though a lot of them are now antiques. But off the top of my head, bristols (tits), brassic (penniless), porkies (lies), scooby (clue), ruby (curry), berk (oval office), and cobblers (lies/nonsense) are in current use, and 'raspberry' is so old it made it to the USA in the late C19 (but originally it was 'raspberry tart', ie, fart). Thinking back to the oldest people I've heard use rhyming slang (some of them so old they're now dead), I can include butchers (look), barnet (hair), china (mate), apples and pears (stairs, which takes four times longer to say than 'stairs' but was rarely shortened), and the mystifying 'Harris', meaning backside ('Bottle and glass' for 'arse', then 'Aristotle' for 'bottle', then shorten it to 'Aris', according to Wikipedia. This still sounds like utter cobblers to me, but I have no better explanation).
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Dec 22, 2020 12:08
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That Wikipedia entry is pretty interesting, I still use the phrase 'on my tod' but had no idea of the origin. Shocking really considering my heritage (I'm part Womble).
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Dec 22, 2020 14:12
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Ordering the army to blast unarmed catholic civilians on a march mate Saying you'll never have an official inquiry into any army conduct in NI like a well good bloke coronation street
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Dec 22, 2020 15:40
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Platystemon posted:fairy liquid I was about to say this as my grandmother uses that as her dish/dishwasher soap word, that and calling vacuuming Hoovering. My favorite word is scrummy.
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Dec 22, 2020 16:17
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HashtagGirlboss posted:I know it’s just a weird British thing but the purple ribbon cracks me the gently caress up every time, like he’s just so loving proud his goat got seventh place at the village fair
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Dec 22, 2020 18:56
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field balm posted:Do Americans really not say fortnight? So common here in upsy downy prison land (Australia) too I've never said fortnight unironically. I was gonna say Abraham Lincoln said it in a speech but he said 4 score.
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Dec 22, 2020 19:13
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Calling private schools public schools and vice versa.
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Dec 24, 2020 22:43
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OwlFancier posted:Do americans have cubby holes? Called the Pope's Nose, heretic. Cubby holes are where we put our, like, coats and stuff in kindergarten. Someone explain how 'public schools' are the private, for-pay schools of the elite, that are not available to the public. ^^Hah, holy crap, serves me right responding to the first thing I see and not reading down Also after listening to BoJo on NPR, 'jot and tittle'.
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Dec 25, 2020 02:58
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Regarde Aduck posted:*walks onto stage and leans too close to microphone* Ha yor fa' got a dickey, bor? Willy cum in hair? Ar, hairy cum
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Dec 25, 2020 03:03
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Having the midlands means you can divide England into roughly equal thirds while without them the North is twice as large as the south. They are critically important.
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Dec 27, 2020 13:40
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the midlands are that bit you see in old war movies between the barbed wire trenches of the two opposing front lines
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Dec 27, 2020 15:24
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PipHelix posted:Called the Pope's Nose, heretic. 'Public Schools' are the very old, very expensive and very weird schools that were founded centuries ago when the only other sort of schools had restrictions on who could attend them - you had to belong to a certain religious denomination, your father had to be in a certain trade or a member of a certain guild, or you had to live within the city/borough/parish/county that funded the school. If you qualified, education was free. If you didn't qualify, no education for you. Thus developed the 'public school', originally as a form of charity. Such schools would take anyone from anywhere so long as they passed the entrance exam or had sufficiently promising references, were funded by charitable donations and were overseen by a group of trustees chosen as a form of public office. So the schools were funded by, and open to, the general public unlike the other institutional schools. The public schools gained a reputation for high quality teaching and being a good preparation for a university education. So aristocratic families began sending their sons to public schools, which was allowed on the condition that the rich families paid a large fee which not only paid the cost of their own kid's education and boarding costs but contributed to the charitable activities of the school. Over the centuries this balance slowly shifted so the public schools became predominantly full of rich aristo spawn with a few lucky poor kids on scholarships or grants. The fees remained very high, but now both to pay for the school and to keep the 'wrong sort'. In the 1860s an Act of Parliament formally released the seven main public schools from any sort of public control or oversight and their charitable obligations, turning them purely into very expensive schools for the sons of very rich families delivering a classical education, mostly aimed at producing generations of intellectually incurious and emotionally stunted army officers and colonial administrators to forge and run the Empire. So a Public School was a good idea to provide high quality education to anyone which got hijacked by the aristocracy and turned into a production line for Tory Prime Ministers. Nowadays a 'public school' is one of these venerable schools which was not tied to a specific institution and had to be released from its charitable obligations by a Public Schools Act in the 1800s. 'Private Schools' were fee-paying schools which never had any legal charitable obligations and were just profit-making businesses for their owners. These days it gets complicated because both the old elitist public schools and the thousands of more normal private schools can now register themselves as charities to both accept donations and avoid paying a lot of tax despite many of them swimming in both income and wealth. But the terminology basically boils down to: Public School = Elitist fee-paying school that has been around centuries and was originally a legally chartered charity. Private School = Any other fee-paying school. Not as elitist. May be 600 years old, may have been founded last week. State School = Free-at-service school open to everyone who lives in its defined catchment area, funded by the (national) state via taxation. Made more complicated by successive governments inviting private foundations and corporations to partner with the local education authority in funding and running schools, but the 'no fees, open to all' bit remains.
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Dec 27, 2020 15:55
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BalloonFish posted:very in depth answer EmmyOk posted:Ordering the army to blast unarmed catholic civilians on a march mate Also yes, absolutely. Setting up an archipelago of blacksite torture chambers in the 70s-80s that provides international precedent/cover for John Yoo's repeal of every rule of law in war in the GWOT, thus proper chuffing the yanks across the pond. Brilliant.
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Dec 27, 2020 21:41
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Here's one. British last names what's up with that. I feel like I've heard that: 1. The royals have no last names. Fixed last names as opposed to patronymics or place names are for taxation and they do the taxation. So it's not Elizabeth Windsor, It's Elizabeth II, no one's gonna confuse her for some other Elizabeth. Correct or no? 2. <blank>son - Jameson, Richardson, Robertson, etc. The ones who got to keep patronymics were basically petty nobles etc. yea? 3. The 'barcode names' like Taylor, Cooper, Smith, Shoemaker. You are your function and so is your family forever. Just how the gently caress did that ever get started? Like, I know WHY the government did it, for tax reasons, and I get that once the new tradition is set it's just the way things are done, and a name is just a name and a rose by any other name whatever. But did people not have any family pride? How do you make that transition work? "Hey are you John Hutchinson? The farmer? Yea, well guess what, gently caress your dad and your own sense of your own identity, king says you're John Farmer. Yea, and gently caress your kid there, Robert Johnson, too. He's Robert Farmer and your whole family is now your function, forever." Why would people not just, like, shrug tell the taxman to call them whatever he needs in his ledger and then continue using their actual family names? Source, I'm American Irish where our names are mostly misspelled/anglicized versions of clans or places that none of us, gun to our heads, could give more info on than what you'd learn off of a guinness coaster or a weeklong package tour. But still, at least I'm named for something technically meaningful to my heritage instead of like, 'Colin Turfcutter' or whatever.
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Dec 28, 2020 20:07
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1. the current royals family name is Coburg Saxe - Gotha, which they performatively changed to Windsor because it sounded too German. 2. no, surname associations don't mean anything and haven't for a long time 3. nobody cares about 'family pride' unless you happen to be an old money conservative who goes to the same private school his father did etc. I don't really understand what you mean by 'meaningful heritage'? nobody is going to ask your name and say 'ah Joe Cocksniffer? of the Anusville Cocksniffers? our grandfathers established irelands first handjob factory in 1402!' again unless you're networking as the son of landed gentry.
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Dec 29, 2020 00:24
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PipHelix posted:You are your function and so is your family forever. Just how the gently caress did that ever get started? It was the Diocletian’s reaction to the Crisis of the Third Century, OP.
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Dec 29, 2020 11:09
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I would suggest specifically that the "jimmy bumfucker of the cockring on trent bumfuckers" kind of familial lineage is actually a far more american thing, because specifically it was a thing the weird royalists brought over to the americas when they emigrated and created the american aristocracy. In the UK it remains an idiotically posh thing to do but the US seems weirdly obsessed with geneaology by comparison because over there it seems to be an aspirational thing, whereas over here it marks you as a weird inbred who is probably 30% horse by genetic weight. I also... don't at all know where this idea of the government assigning names based on profession comes from? Historically as far as I am aware names were either singular, patronyms, or related to a trade, because people weren't very inventive and didn't really bother with familial names beyond that. You were either bill, bill bobson, or bill baker (because you were a baker, or your dad (bob) was a baker, or both). But I don't think the government went round demanding people stop being called other things and start using their jobs as surnames? Why would they do that? How would that even work when there is no centralized census or record keeping? The use of jobs as a surname is part of the origin of surnames. Along with places and attributes. So you would have a guy whose given name was kevin, then if he lives where there's more than one kevin he might end up as kevin short (cos he's short) kevin rivers (cos he lives next to the river) or kevin cooper (cos it's his job). Which is also how we do it nowadays except we do it the other way around (big kev, builder kev, loud kev) I guess also if you go back there is also the concept of the cognomen which the romans liked using, scipio africanus etc, but not many people were going out conquering africa so I don't imagine that was very applicable to your average peasant. OwlFancier has a new favorite as of 11:32 on Dec 29, 2020 |
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Dec 29, 2020 11:22
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PipHelix posted:2. <blank>son - Jameson, Richardson, Robertson, etc. The ones who got to keep patronymics were basically petty nobles etc. yea? Generally you didn't need a surname unless you were a noble, until you did, then you picked one or had one picked for you. 'John, son of John the Shepherd' could end up as a John Johnson or John Shepherd or even John Shepson when it came time for doing something legal, like getting hung for poaching.
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Dec 29, 2020 11:46
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With the exception of Iceland which still has legit patrynomics eventually the governments of europe and then asia/africa/americas through colonization eventually said "okay stop you can't keep changing names each generation because I can't keep track of whose supposed to inherit this half-acre of land and more importantly be taxed on it. All of your sons and their sons and their sons are also going to be Bill Short from now on now I don't care how tall they are." Some more recent than others. Poland didn't start having surnames for non-nobles until the 19th century while Iran held out until World War 1. But the government didn't really "choose" their last name they fixed the name that was already there in place or forced a guy with no second name to just pick one he thought sounded nice. The point was keeping track of property inheritance lines not scrupulously making sure that England's baker population was free from tailor taint. BIG FLUFFY DOG has a new favorite as of 11:52 on Dec 29, 2020 |
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Dec 29, 2020 11:50
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OwlFancier posted:Which is also how we do it nowadays except we do it the other way around (big kev, builder kev, loud kev) This method is especially noticeable in small local pubs where everyone knows everyone. Oh that guy? That's plumber John, sitting next to Hospital Andy. Usually happens if you've got a common enough name. We don't bother with learning anyone's actual surname half the time.
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Dec 29, 2020 12:03
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OwlFancier posted:I would suggest specifically that the "jimmy bumfucker of the cockring on trent bumfuckers" kind of familial lineage is actually a far more american thing, because specifically it was a thing the weird royalists brought over to the americas when they emigrated and created the american aristocracy. In the UK it remains an idiotically posh thing to do but the US seems weirdly obsessed with geneaology by comparison because over there it seems to be an aspirational thing, whereas over here it marks you as a weird inbred who is probably 30% horse by genetic weight. While the US is obsessed with genealogy I don't think it's because of cavalier heritage.
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Dec 29, 2020 14:55
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I recently read an article where a British guy referred to champagne as "champers."
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Dec 29, 2020 18:37
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Platystemon posted:“Bloody”, but it’s like a bad word so sometimes it’s censored??? But "Bloody Minded" means stubborn and officious.
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Dec 29, 2020 19:01
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Do things ever get awkward when you actually just want to know how someone’s father is?
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Dec 29, 2020 19:13
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