Anglo-American communications studies

[Ken Brown]

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