Americans do not have electric kettles within the intended British meaning. They tend not to know what you are talking about. The product is absent from the shelves at Target and Walmart. Most Canadian households would have electric kettles where gas cooking is not involved. Something about tea-making perhaps? On Thu, 4 Jan 2001 12:10:14 -0500, you wrote:

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

Harmon Seaver wrote:

Amazing what passes for cryptic comments these days.

Maybe it *is* crypto? The email equivalent of a numbers station. Who knows whether or not: " Please remove "Shanah Tovah" item which appears after doing a search of my name Cheryl Gilan." is in fact a cryptic message to release an ETA bomb squad somewhere in Spain? David Honig wrote:

So what do you call the artifacts that warm your homes, and where are they located? Boilers and radiators? Embedded wires? Fireplaces? Peat fires? Mad-cow-dung fires?

Boilers. No-one I know uses hot air to heat a domestic house though you do get it in some large commercial buildings. These days they are smaller, and sit on the wall, often in a cupboard. They no longer store water, just heat it up on the way through. I should think that 99% of all new houses and flats use that sort. Mine is in a sort of broom-cupboard beside the toilet. Older ones tend to be largish lagged things, often in the attic (i.e. space below the roof). John Young wrote:

In New York City, there is an important distinction between cellar and basement. Cellars are not habitable while basements are. The building code definition of a basement is that at least half its height is above street level, and that of cellar is that just over half its height is below street level. Many residential buildings are designed to take advantage of that distinction. The rule covers sloping site conditions to average the difference between front and back.

500 years ago "cellar" didn't necessarily imply underground at all. When brick came into general use in domestic houses it enabled the building of cheap chimneys, which enabled the older "hall" houses to be divided by a floor into an upstairs and a downstairs. In many medium-sized houses the family moved upstairs (in larger ones they were already there at one end of the hall in the "solar") leaving the business (kitchen, goods, servants, animals) below. Some houses used brick or stone to reinforce the floor, erecting pillars to support it & that became a "cellar" whether or not it was below street level. Chimneys, ceilings, furniture, printing & Protestantism all became common in England in one generation sometime in the late 15th or early 16th century. OK, the Protestantism was a little later. Harmon Seaver wrote:

In different areas of the US we have different tems for the thing get water out of at the sink. In the south it's often called spigot, and in the north faucet. Also tap. What do you Brits call that?

Tap. We find the word "faucet" funny, it sounds as if it should be slightly obscene, a good example of the US habit of never using a short word when a long one will do. But when I found myself amongst Americans I was slightly disappointed to find that they almost all say "tap" these days. Just as they say "car" instead of "automobile". You are obviously all watching too much British TV, or listening to too many British rock bands. You should defend your language against this tide of old-world vulgarity. Ken Brown

Tim May wrote:

I'm now 49, and "car" has been much more common in these United States than "automobile" has been, in my lifetime.

Further, I often hear Britishisms which are far longer and more labored than the American equivalents. For example:

"articulated lorry" vs. "semi"

"redundant" vs. "laid-off"

"Mackintosh" vs. "raincoat"

"redundant" which has a technical legal meaning that is different from "laid-off" (which we also use). "artic" & "mac" are both normal (though the second now old-fashioned - who wears raincoats any more anyway?)

"Pantechnicon" = "moving van"

(I only learned this last one on a site devoted to Britishisms vs. Americanisms.)

Don't believe all you read on the web :-) I wouldn't have known "pantechnicon" was a van if you'd asked me. And we used to think you didn't have the word "van" - we thought you always said "truck" or "pick-up". (Though when I went to Texas my colleagues seemed to use the word "van" to include passenger vehicles - the large car/small bus sort of thing that gets sold as a "people mover" over here. For us a "van" is for carrying things more than people, though plenty of drivers use them as cars) Anyway - I heard Americans on the TV last week talking about "railway" instead of "railroad". And "station" instead of "depot" (though Grand Central Station is I suppose quite old, so you must have had that one for a while) As you said:

Fact is, both dialects of English have longer versions of the same basic word than other dialects have. Which is preferable is a matter of taste and familiarity.

and there are very few opportunities for real misunderstanding. We know "Randy" is a name in the US, even if we snigger when we hear it, and any American spending more than 5 minutes in Britain UK would find out that a "fag" is a cigarette, so no harm done. If there is any chance of confusion it is in the connotations of speech rather than the denotations. "Homely" has the same literal meaning (home-like, reminiscent of home) on both sides of the Atlantic but in Britain it is emotionally slightly positive (Tolkien's "Last Homely House") & in the US very negative, mostly used as a euphemism for "ugly". The same applies ot tone of voice. Brits (& Australians) seem mostly less sensitive to insult than Americans but more to sarcasm & irony. So we can sometimes be rude to you & you don't notice - and we can be friendly and you think we are being rude. And presumably it works the other way round as well. The society that invented the breakfast meeting must have developed many exquisite verbal tortures that us plainspeaking Brits miss out on. Ken

[Apologies for continuing this odd thread but ...] On Mon, 8 Jan 2001, Tim May wrote:

...

Anyway - I heard Americans on the TV last week talking about "railway" instead of "railroad". And "station" instead of "depot" (though Grand Central Station is I suppose quite old, so you must have had that one for a while)

The most interesting Britishism to suddenly invade our shores and spread rapidly is "gone missing." I'm now hearing this in American movies, t.v. shows, and, importantly, television news. "The hunt is on for the fugitives in Texas who have gone missing." This is definitely new to our shores; I'm surprised (and pleased) at how rapidly it has spread.

"At university" and "at hospital" have not become common (though "at

The more common British term is "in hospital". I don't recall ever hearing anyone say "at hospital". There are innumerable small distinctions in usage . If you are in hospital, you are ill, not a member of the staff. Your being ill may the result of an injury. That is, the same term covers both sicknesses and injuries. If you are in hospital because of a broken back, people will say that you are ill. If you are sick, on the other hand, it means that you have vomited.

college" and "at school" are fully equivalent and are common).

They aren't equivalent at all. In the UK [young] children go to "school" and "college" generally refers to something very roughly equivalent to either an American senior high school or junior college. My company has university students spending a year or so with us on placement; if you ask them when they are going back to school, they tend to be offended, thinking you are poking fun at them. Taking the mickey, that is. -- Jim Dixon VBCnet GB Ltd http://www.vbc.net tel +44 117 929 1316 fax +44 117 927 2015

...

and there are very few opportunities for real misunderstanding.

So Ken if you read that Blair was near Thatcher's house and knocked her up, Yanks would think something very different from Brits.

At 11:45 AM 1/9/01 +0000, Ken Brown wrote:

David Honig wrote:

...

...

...

and there are very few opportunities for real misunderstanding.

So Ken if you read that Blair was near Thatcher's house and knocked her up, Yanks would think something very different from Brits.

You've been listening to those old Max Miller records again, haven't you?

No, a british (Birmingham) cell biologist used it in casual conversation in the early 1990s. I was struck by the humor of it at the time.

On Mon, 8 Jan 2001, David Honig wrote:

At 08:17 AM 1/8/01 -0500, Ken Brown wrote:

...

and there are very few opportunities for real misunderstanding. We know

The meaning of 'billion' differs by three orders of magnitude across the pond. That's plenty of room for confusion :-)

And in the US, "billiards" is a game played with cues and balls on a felt-covered slate table. In the UK, it's also a very large number. Thankfully, so large that that definition rarely comes into conversation. As I understand cross-pond conversions, it goes like this.... USA UK Scientific Thousand Thousand 1E3 Million Million 1E6 Billion Milliard 1E9 Trillion Billion 1E12 Quadrillion Billiard 1E15 Quintillion Trillion 1E18 Sextillion Trilliard 1E21 Septillion Quadrillion 1E24 Octillion Quadrilliard 1E27 etc etc etc This silliness seems regular, and has no good reason not to extend indefinitely. But perversely, both dialects use the same word for googols and larger quantities. This is one reason why I tend to just say "screw it" and go to scientific notation when writing. That way it's clear what I mean no matter where the reader is from. Bear

Actual boiler-type furnaces are quite rare in the US, and

No they aren't. Out of 5 apartments I lived in in Chicago, 4 of them had steam heat. So did the apartments of most of my friends. My grandmother's house in Saint Louis has/had a boiler and steam heat. -- A quote from Petro's Archives: ********************************************** "As someone who has worked both in private industry and in academia, whenever I hear about academics wanting to teach ethics to people in business, I want to puke."--Thomas Sowell.

...

...

Actual boiler-type furnaces are quite rare in the US, and

No they aren't. Out of 5 apartments I lived in in Chicago, 4 of them had steam heat. So did the apartments of most of my friends.

My grandmother's house in Saint Louis has/had a boiler and steam heat.

It's strongly related to the age of the building, as well as climate, fuel costs and convenience, etc. Most modern construction uses forced-air heating, it's cheap, responds rapidly, doesn't take up room space, and the ductwork can be used for central air-conditioning. My condo in Silicon Valley uses electric baseboard heat, which was a fad in the 60s and 70s when electricity was cheap, and has high ceilings so it doesn't need A/C in this climate. My apartment in Berkeley 20+ years ago had a gas-fired wall heater, relatively small and efficient for a 3-room place. My house in New Jersey, built in 1931, had steam radiators, with an oil-fired boiler that was originally coal-fired; my sister's house in Delaware is a bit older and has hot-water radiators. I paid less for winter heat in the Berkeley apartment than I did for summer electricity in New Jersey; I pay more now for winter heat in this mild California climate than I did in New Jersey where the winter gets reasonably cold, because electricity's more expensive than oil (even with lower night-time prices) and high ceilings are much better for keeping cool in the summer than warm in the winter, plus nobody bothered to insulate buildings out here in the 70s. Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639