Re: "write him" was Re: More questions

John Cowan wrote:
 > Stephen Mulraney scripsit:

 >>_I'm after going there_: I mean "I've just gone there". Interpreted as
 >>"I want to go there" (bizarrely phrased)

 > This is heavily marked as Hiberno-English.

It is, but it's such a basic construction in my speech that I have a
hard time intercepting it. Also, people don't always recognise it as
such in Britain (I mean, you're think as the UK's major English-speaking
neighbor, there'd be some slight awareness of the existence of Ireland
in everyday life. But Ireland might as well be in the Pacific Ocean as
far as most Britishers are concerned. Of course you meet the opposite
attitude too: "No, I'm from Ireland". "Oh, and I thought you were
Foreign" quotha. :)

 >>_press_: I mean "cupboard" (which to me means a "kitchen dresser").
 > And what do you mean by that?

I thought that might be asked :). Have a butcher's 'ere:
http://www.btinternet.com/~adlivingston/new-furniture.htm

This being an item which usually (in recent years) seems confined to
farmhouses (or rather, houses decorated in a farmhouse style), it's
not really a part of my experience. Thus, I have little use for the
word "cupboard" in its proper (to me) sense, and the option of using it
instead of "press" doesn't really arise, since the less I use it, the
more it transparently becomes a board for putting cups on.

By a press, I mean any wall-mounted (or wall-adjacent) box with a door
on the front, for storing food or delph (sigh... "crockery"), or indeed
non-kitchen items. In my parents' house in Dublin, there's a wardrobe
with shelves in one part, and I would refer to that part (but not the
vertical, wardrobe part) as a "press", too.

 >
 > To me a cupboard is essentially a tall thin wooden (or metal) box
 > attached to the wall, with shelves and a door, and used to store
 > non-perishable food, plates, glasses, and such.  It can be either
 > near the floor or near the ceiling, but rarely in between.
 > If it contains anything else, it is a "cabinet".

Ah, to me "cabinet" is a somewhat more specific or technical term
("cabinetmaker", for instance). I'm unlikely to call an actual
functioning everyday instance of one a "cabinet", instead subsuming it
under the useful ... you got it... "press" :).


 >>_pot_: I mean a "saucepan" (a word I can't bring myself to use - it's
 >>like saying _spikespoon_ for _fork_). Sometimes understood. Thanks to
 >>context, I've never had it taken as a reference to marijuana. But I'm
 >>surprised it misunderstood at all.

 > I share your view about "pot", and am frequently confused when my wife
 > (a Southerner) refers to an obvious pot as a pan.  She calls all such
 > utensils pans, whereas for me "pan" has to be qualified as "frying pan"
 > or "cake pan" or such.

Damn right!

 >>In the other direction, I once missed out on a useful aid in a maths

 > "Math" in North America.

It often sounds like a groan of agony coming from an American's mouth. :)

 >>And even English people don't seem to be able to agree on what "Warning:
 >>Adverse camber" means on a road sign :)

 > Well, I gather it means that the road is excessively slanted, but whether
 > up, down, left, or right, I have no idea.

I think Tim has gotten it. I think the difficulty with it is that it's
rather difficult to describe curvature of surfaces in everyday language,
so the exact meaning, once heard, doesn't stay in people's minds very
long, unless they're differential geometers.

 > I too am rhotic, and have no trouble saying [bar\kli] for the philosopher,
 > and [br\=kli], as the natives do, for the city in California.  This is a
 > sound change in the 17th-18th century that mostly got backed out, but
 > left a few traces behind in proper names and the RP pronunciation of
 > "clerk" and a few other words.

Maybe it bypassed Ireland? "Clerk" and the philosopher present similar
problems to me, but with the first it's surmountable since it's just
an oddly-spelled item of vocabulary, while "Berkshire" is something
that's mostly only talked about by English peoples, and so I rarely
hear it divorced from the accent.

--
"Socialism plus electrification equals communism"   Stephen Mulraney
   -- Vladimir Il'ich Lenin, after a demonstration   ataltane@ataltane.net
      of the Theremin by its inventor.

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