CommonFreddy Woo writes, "My wife thinks calling the front room a lounge is common. Worse, a friend of hers recently admonished her daughter for calling a toilet, a toilet. Lavatory darling. It's lavatory."
My own mother refused to let me use the word 'oblong' instead of 'rectangle'. Which is just odd, to be honest.
What stuff do you think is common?
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chthonic, Thu 16 Oct 2008, 16:06)
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Wish I could get a pint, but I still work for another hour.I don't even pretend to like football, for what that's worth.
Had George not been treating us like serfs we probably wouldn't have broken away from you lot. Blame him for it, the greedy swine.
Things like Cockney rhyming slang give me the squitters. I finally had to ask why Americans are called septics. Should've known. It's the British weakness for obfuscation for its own sake.
I prefer the KISS principle in all things- especially language!
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The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Tue 21 Oct 2008, 21:16,
1 reply)
SepticsIn all fairness, septics isn't used in normal speech unless you're talking to military (or ex) types, it's a very common term in the forces only.
I didn't put two and two together myself until fairly recently.
If you don't like rhyming slang I can tell you probably wouldn't get along with certain regional dialects, like Welsh or Yorkshirian :P
(, Tue 21 Oct 2008, 21:30, closed)
It's not a dislikeof the rhyming slang itself so much as not being used to it and having a lot of trouble decyphering it. As an engineer I have to puzzle out a lot of things as it stands- having to puzzle out slang is just another layer on the manure pile.
I've only met one Welsh so far, and she's lovely.
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The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Tue 21 Oct 2008, 21:36,
closed)
Yeahbut she's not really very welsh at all, until she's had a couple.
The septics thing is generally only used by antipodeans rather than brits.
And I love the KISS principle too. I always choose to rock and roll all night and party every day.
Also, there are quite a few american terms that come up in TV programmes that don't make sense to us either, but I guess we see more of your telly than you see of ours so we get a lot more cultural references than you do.
(, Tue 21 Oct 2008, 21:55, closed)
Really?Like what? I thought that most American slang was pretty well known and self-explanatory...
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The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Wed 22 Oct 2008, 13:57,
closed)
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