Anglo-American communications studies

On Thu, 4 Jan 2001, Steve Mynott wrote:

Ken Brown writes:

On a tangent a friend claimed Americans didn't have electric kettles for boiling water.

Can anyone confirm whether this is true?

sigh. Americans tend not to call something a "kettle" unless it's large, at least a 6-qt capacity. We don't have non-specialized electric cooking vessels in that size on the market. However, we have electric coffeepots that size and larger, and electric "hotpots" of a smaller size (around 2qt) suitable for heating water to brew tea, and electric "rice cookers" of approx. 3-4qt capacity that are entirely suitable for boiling water if you don't want to cook rice. I'd be inclined to think that this is just a terminology issue.

I think "furnace" is "boiler" in English.

Hm. Not all furnaces are boilers. Basically we use the word "furnace" here to mean the heating unit for a house. One kind of furnace is a boiler, which heats liquid that then gets circulated through radiators. Other types of furnaces are electrical, or fired by gas, coal, oil, or wood. Sometimes they heat a gigantic rock that then radiates heat for days (this arrangement is popular in arid northern and northwestern states). More often they heat air, channeled through a heat-exchanger by a fan and then circulated directly through the rest of the house via ductwork. Actual boiler-type furnaces are quite rare in the US, and I haven't seen a coal-fired furnace since I was a child. They're still out there, though; although they are now illegal for pollution reasons here in CA, there are places in the midwest where once in a while you still find them in use. Bear