Re: CHAT: Education words in various English dialects // was"Mister"
| From: | H. S. Teoh <hsteoh@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, October 25, 2000, 16:22 |
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On Wed, Oct 25, 2000 at 10:44:30AM -0400, John Cowan wrote:
> Adrian Morgan wrote:
>
> > I mention this because it's another education word, but of course there
> > are many trans-oceanic differences/overlaps, even among such seemingly
> > innocent words as "shed", "lemonade" and countless others.
>
> What's the "shed" problem?
You can shed hair, and some animals shed their skin; however, you can also
store the lawn-mower in the shed.
> I know about "lemonade", and about the trouble with
> the American hackish expression "go root" (= "assume super-user capability
> on a Unix system").
[snip]
Heh. Nowadays, it has been shortened to "root", and used like a regular
verb: "I rooted the system" = "I broke into the system and managed to gain
super-user access".
T