Re: CHAT: F.L.O.E.S.

John Cowan:
> And Rosta scripsit:
>
> > Alternatively, it could, as you suggest, be
> > taken from AmE, but this seems unlikely, since pasta must
> > have become a feature of quotidian Australian life a bit
> > earlier than hearing AmE (on telly etc.) did.
>
> Distinguish between pasta and the word "pasta".  When I was a
> kid, I knew spaghetti and ravioli, but had no generic term;
> thirty years later, "pasta" is in every kid's vocabulary.
My early schooldays, as I recall them, were spent, when not
tiedyeing kaftans, in making pictures by using foul-smelling
glue to affix to pieces of cardboard various kinds of *pasta*.
I can't imagine what we called it, if not "pasta". Now,
you're only 8 years older than me -- can it be that in a
mere 8 years, it passed from being nameless to being a
staple of the classroom? Admittedly, it was an era of
rapid social change and rapidly abandoned experiments (e.g.
you had whole coffee table books about how to build furniture
out of cornflake packets), but all the same...

--And.