UK and America are two countries separated by a common language, UK and US Q&A

[Pipbin]

Continuation of the previous thread where posters from the UK ask questions like 'what the hell is going on with the gaps in US toilet doors'; and posters fro the US ask things like 'what is with wearing stripes'

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/a2149133-to-think-there-is-something-wrong-with-Americans?msgid=48969042#48969042

HappyAgainOneDay It would be he went to jail, not the jail. It's a really tricky difference, but in that case, jail implies a process or action as well. He went to jail means he was arrested. You would only use 'the' to show the action of begin jailed didn't happen, like "He went to the jail, to visit his friend."

In other words, where you don't say "he went to hospital" because it sounds like a verb, you say "He went to jail" because you are implying a verb as well. To jail, he was jailed.

He went to dinner. (He is dining.) He went to the restaurant.

These are not actually taught rules, but they're the kind of nuances you'd use without knowing why as a native speaker. I do some work with children learning English as a second language, so I'm used to figuring out the answers to these kinds of questions, but most English speaking Americans would just use them without knowing why. (As a small child, your brain follows the patterns of the language around you and replicates them.)

pipbin a cup of butter is eight ounces.

I've been here 10 years in the UK and I still giggle at "spotted dick." [blulsh]

even

Hmm no: 'to hospital' does not sound like a verb and this is where the subtlety between British and American English comes. "I gashed my finger, I went to hospital to have it stitched", is any old hospital. Or, he was jailed, any jail, I don't know which. He was sent to the jail - some specific jail that everyone would know.

I can see that we have a verb to jail whereas we don't have a verb to hospital.

The prom (known as debutante ball or debs) in Dublin at least is a longstanding tradition based I believe on the debutante ball idea. Nowadays the 'deb' part stands for debauchery more than anything genteel that Queen Victoria would have lent her name to. I was quite surprised to learn schools in Britain tend not to have a ball, but then Ireland has the milestone of the Leaving Cert that most students take at 17/18 and a class group would have been together for the preceding 5 or 6 years, so I suppose it is more fitting to mark the occasion when almost everyone leaves school - together -and moves on with their lives.

If you live near a big, traditionally Democratic-voting and Democratic-run city you find there are more unions representing all sorts of workers, and wielding more clout than elsewhere. They draw membership from service and public service employees, and many construction trades (carpenters, steel workers, etc) and trades like plumbers and electricians. And of course there are the Teamsters (transport). Unions in the construction trade offer health insurance and pension plans to the average carpenter or bricklayer or welder who would not otherwise be able to find affordable insurance. They also negotiate rates with developers. There are 'Locals' (local union offices) all over the place and members can look at job postings, etc. To get a job on many construction sites you need a union card. To get a city contract it is often necessary to employ union members. My local big city had no Walmarts until very recently because Walmart refuses to allow employees to organise and unions in the city exerted enough influence to be able to stop the spread of Walmart.

While the net result of having unions is often very good, unions in my local city tended historically to be closed to African Americans, making the development of a black middle class very difficult as adult men were squeezed out of even unskilled construction (brick carriers, diggers) and city jobs (garbage collector for instance), traditionally the means for immigrants to gain a foothold in society.

Locally here, there is a chain of supermarkets known as 'The Jewel' whose actual name is Jewel. Only blow-ins call it Jewel. Everyone else uses 'The Jewel'.

Even more pedantic, it is a sponge cake which is assembled into a sandwich and can be called either. My cook books and the internet seem split pretty evenly about the name.

I'm attaching a picture of Delia CCC and an almost thirty year old GH.

LaVolcan The verb would be 'to hospitalise'. It is used.

Can someone remind me please. How many ounces is a cup of butter?

As shown from my freezer, so a cup of butter is half a pound. NB US cup, not UK.

Hospitalize is a verb in the US, too.

'To hospitalise' (hospitalize?) is a bit American though? It never used to be used here but is heard now, (or it is in The Guardian or the BBC but they like to use Americanisms when they can). 'He has been hospitalised' is not very British, is it?

But then, Americans have a habit of turning nouns into verbs and verbs into nouns... (she says, scratching her head to think of a few. You might have to wait until tomorrow afternoon for the old brain to tick over for some examples).

re-gift

argh.

Verbing has been a feature of the English language long before English speakers brought the language to the New World. It has been referred to as the "glory as well as the bane" of the English language. Many of the most common verbs in the language were once nouns.

What is re-gifting? Is it passing off some unwanted gift to someone else? Is the expression American or just the act?

I wouldn't have thought it was a particularly American behaviour, although hiding offending article in the cupboard and taking it out to put on display when the person who gave it to you comes to visit is more likely to happen and pretend that you like it.

But now we have pre-order. In the old days, you just went to order something which wasn't in stock. This could have been because it hadn't been issued/published or because the shop had run out - there was no 'pre' necessary.

I wonder if the difference between 'taken to hospital' and 'taken to the hospital' comes from US towns being so far apart that there was only one hospital that someone could be taken to. In the England you might well be taken to a hospital in a different town because of their facilities.

Thank you for the ounces in a cup.

Do any of our American posters have a never fail tried and tested brownie recipe?

No I also have to disagree about "he went to jail" souding like a verb. It doesn't. If it was a verb then it would have to be "He went to jail the prisoner, and found that he had escaped" You can't jail yourself, you jail somebody else. I don't know why the distinction is there but the person above who said we tend to use "the" when the speaker knows which specific one that would mean and drop the article when it's not clear which one.

"He has been hospitalis/zed" is far more British than American because Americans don't as a rule use the present perfect tense unless specifying length of time (he has been here [for] twenty years) or ever/never (I've never been to Paris). They don't say "I've done the dishes" they say "I did the dishes".

I would say hospitalise is a formal and probably quite modern verb which is only used in the passive. "He was hospitalised with an infection". If you were using the active tense then you'd say something like "Gary went mad and put him in hospital" or "The infection landed him in hospital"

I teach ESL as well and I have long conversations about this stuff with American (and other nationality) english teachers at parties, that's always fun, and really interesting. I agree it's odd trying to work out the rules because as a native speaker you take them for granted and never really think about how they work.

To re-gift is to give away an unwanted gift as a gift you have bought yourself

the original re-grifter was Bryan Cranston (Seinfeld fans will know this)

I suggested we had take out last night I have only been in the states for 3 weeks

The number of ounces changes for different things depending on the density and how packed that thing is.

Does it have to be a brownie recipe? I have a good chocolate sheet cake recipe link.

Re using the perfect tense:

Some years ago we had an American girl staying with us. I came back from work and found a note saying 'We went swimming', which to me implies that the swimming was now over and they were back home. 'Where did you go this afternoon?' 'We went swimming'.

But no, not a sign of anyone in the house. I thought it odd because until then, I didn't realise that was a typical American construction. I would have expected 'We've gone swimming', meaning that they were still out there.

The number of ounces changes for different things depending on the density and how packed that thing is.

Other stuff I can cope with, I have some cup measures, it was simply the butter that I just can't see how you can have a cup of it.

You can say 'he was jailed'.

I know 'hospitalisation' and 'he was hospitalised' are used in Ireland.

www.hersheys.com/pure-recipes/details.aspx?id=5008

I like this brownie recipe.

I find myself switching to British English on here but I don't mean to, it just seems to happen!

Thanks for all the well wishes for DD. She got five stitches above her eye, poor little thing. We had a great time at the cabin and are now making the looooong trek back home.