Words, words, words. There are so many of them that just don't translate quite exactly from British English to American English. Here are four that have troubled me this week.
1) I still haven't discovered what 'aseptic drinks' are. There's an aisle in Dillons supermarket that has 'aseptic drinks' as its title (I've mentioned this before, but I never found out the answer). I just hope they're the ones I'm buying, because I sure as heck don't want to discover that I've been putting septic apple juice in my kids' packed lunches.
2) Packed lunches. Now, I know you call them 'sack lunches' over here, but I think maybe sometimes you call them 'packed lunches' too. It's just that every time I think I hear someone say 'packed lunch', I can't quite tell whether it was, in fact, 'sack lunch', and it doesn't feel quite right to say "hang on a minute... did you say 'packed lunch' there, a la British English, or was it just the usual American 'sack lunch' after all?" because, frankly, does it matter anyway?
3) My daughter's homework. The instructions asked us to listen to her read the 'decodable reader'. Hello? Hello, teachers? I think you've forgotten that we're parents here, not people deeply entrenched in the minutiae of education theory. What you're asking us to do, is to listen to her read the sentences about Pam and her hat, which she pats, and Sam and his cap, and the fat cat. I can see why you don't want to call it a book. Thin on plot, thin on characterisation. But 'decodable reader'? Puh-lease. Send her home with a reader that is NOT decodable one time, and then I'll be interested in whether your readers are codable or decodable.
4) Meccano. I thought you didn't have Meccano over here. But you do. You just call it something different. You call it 'Erector'. I discovered this in the toy shop, when the owner was showing me round on my first day. She pointed it out to me, and said
"Erector is popular. You'll find that dads often buy Erector, because..."
and I think she continued
"... they remember playing with it when they were kids",
but by that point in the sentence I had my mental hands over my mental ears and I was mentally singing la la la very loudly to myself.
Erector. Please take me home to a land where they call it Meccano.
To further complicate the issue are regional dialects. I don't think I've ever heard 'sack lunch', and I've lived in at least two or three regions (depending on how you define 'region'). 'Brown bag lunch' ("I'm brown-bagging it lately; money's tight."), lunchboxes, just plain lunch.
ReplyDeleteI've NEVER heard of an 'aseptic drink', nor has my housemate. After some googling, the best guess I can make is that they're pasteurized? ("Tetra Therm Aseptic Drink is a beverage pasteurizer...")
We need a decoder to understand all that but the Meccano/ Erector was the funniest!
ReplyDeleteMaggie X
Nuts in May
Erector? NO WAY! I can't imagine going into a shop and asking for it....
ReplyDeleteWell, what can you expect in a country where people are called Randy & wear fanny packs?? But really it must have been a marketing dept's private joke, just to see if they could get away with it. I can hear the potential conversations in the toyshop as I write. a la "I need an Erector set, & I must have it in time for Christmas" or "if my Erector breaks will you swap it for a new one?" OR
ReplyDelete"As a boy I used to play with my Erector every day, couldn't get enough of it"
Ok I'll stop now. Sorry.........
Let us know the best one you hear in yr toyshop.
Erector sets! I love them! But asceptic drinks? That's a new one for me. And I think packed lunch and sack lunch are interchangeable, but maybe then I'm just getting confused since I'm over here in the UK now. Hmmm.
ReplyDeleteAround here they call them bag lunches: "The students will need a bag lunch for the field trip." In the morning when teachers are taking attendance, they ask "Hot or cold lunch?"
ReplyDeleteAt one level I like the idea of 'decodable readers', as the kids experience success in reading - but on another, they learn to expect that every word can be sounded out and then get frustrated when they find they can't.
Erector sounds like something that would be mentioned in a spam email about 'meds'. I love it!
ReplyDeleteI'm sure they call them packed lunches here, or 'bag lunch'. Not sack. Talking of lunches, I've been asked to provide a 'completely disposable' lunch for a field trip - what do you think that means? Considering they bin everything here, including cups and 'baggies'?
As if things weren't difficult enough already! I didn't have Erector when I was young... so don't know what all the fuss is about! Good stuff Iota.
ReplyDeleteSahd.
We "brown bag" it here in Chicago but I've also heard sack lunch.
ReplyDeleteBTW - a completely disposable lunch means don't bring your Star Wars thermal lunch bag - just your lunch in a brown lunch bag.
And never heard of the aseptic drink. Ever.
We had brown bag lunches in Chester. England.
ReplyDeleteAnd my local Sainsburys (in Newbury, England) (it's like Dillons but founded by a lord) has one aisle named "dilutables" and another named "ambient fruit."
It's not going to get any easier or indeed better simply if/when you - hang on, what is the opposite of emigrate? Disemigrate?
I do love the erector though. I hope it is pronounced Eeee-rec-torrrrr. Otherwise it sounds like some kind of competitive, comparitive, no stopitstopitstopit...
Love
Josie
xxx
No comment about errectors.
ReplyDeleteHere's one for you: cake sales and bake sales. It took me eons to refer to them as cake sales in the UK. I kept saying bake sale, as they did in my small part of california, you can't generalize about these things, the US is so big). A cake sale can include fairy cakes, as well as biscuits, chocolate chip cookies (not a typo), brownies and on the one hot day of the year ... ice lollies
I love the thought of Errector!
ReplyDeletei am flummoxed by the decodable reader comment. i have read, and re-read, and i am flummoxed.
ReplyDelete(luckily i googled the spelling of flummoxed before i posted my comment)
Erector, just brilliant. Slightly worried about sack lunches if we are on that theme...
ReplyDeleteWhat the hell is an aseptic drink? Is it something for ulcers? Because it sounds like it ought to be (either cure or cause).
ReplyDeleteAnd I think my husband would fancy an erector for Christmas. Will look into getting him one.
On what planet did a marketing guru think it would be ok to call something an erector!? Maybe it was a bet and he won...only conceivable explanation.
ReplyDeleteGreat post; giggled all the way.
I grew up in the Midwest and I've never heard of an Aseptic drink! It sounds terrifying and like something I would slip inside a trap to kill a rabid animal! Scary!
ReplyDeleteYour take on the Erector set made me laugh out loud! I never really thought of it that way before! (I am sure all of the little boys I have ever known have though!) It really stands for "erecting buildings" not the other thing if that helps!
In my little part of the U.S. we call lunches that are brought to school or work sack lunches, brown bag, packed lunches or cold lunches.
We move about every two to three years, so I have lived all over the U.S. and I have heard it all...except for Aseptic...that one still worries me!
Ha ha, loving the erector! When it's built, is it erect?!! tee hee, could have hours of fun with that one. The aseptic drinks for some reason made me think of TCP, oh right, i'm thinking of ANTIseptic.
ReplyDeleteNightmare.
We used to talk about brown bagging it and we meant buying wine cheaply from the Off Licence and drinking it in the local cemetery rather than paying pub prices. Classy bird, me.
Great post, you do write so well!
Pig x
That is definitely worse than "sucker" which I already thought was bad.
ReplyDeleteSack lunch is what I think most people use although, packed is also used. And I grew up playing with errector sets, but I never heard them simply called errectors that's just odd.
ReplyDeleteNot as odd as aseptic drinks though. We don't have Dillions in my region of the US. What's on that elise?
That is less funny than the scaffold companies in my town that have trucks with the slogan "The Erection Specialists" on the side. Or maybe I'm just defending my beloved Meccano sets, which I bought in the US and which clearly say Meccano on them.
ReplyDeleteI've lived up and down the East Coast in the US and I've never heard sack lunch in person. Only on TV/internet and in books. I guess it's a mid-west thing? I figured it was Canadian, actually...sounds Canadian.
ReplyDeleteI know this is an old thread, but I just stumbled on to it.
ReplyDeleteI can answer some of the above....
Aseptic drinks are the sterile packaging method developed by Tetra Pak where the product is heat treated and then packaged in a sterile lined box. The term is for the packaging method not the drink. The more common name here in the US for some of the products found in this packaging is juice boxes. But now you can get everything from Milk to water in those sterile brick boxes. (other drinks include some of the energy drinks and vegetable drinks. Also non drinks like soups and broth).
Erector sets are nothing new. They have been around the US and the UK for about 100 years. They were invented by AC GIlbert in 1911. The Meccano sets were developed by Frank Hornby in 1901 and originally called "Mechanics Made Easy"
Funny though is the place they first manufactured the Erector sets in the US. In 1913 they called the place the Erector Square Factory in New Haven CT. The original manufacturer went bankrupt in 1967.
The Meccano sets made in the UK and the AC GIlbert Erector sets of the US are different manufacturers. They were competitors. The current Meccano product is made by a French company who has the sets manufactured in France and China. They are not the same Meccano of the UK who went bankrupt in 1980.
In 1981 General Mills(the food company) purchased the assets of Meccano LTD. They marked the erector sets under the Meccano name outside of the US and Erector inside the US. General Mills left the toy business in 1985 and sold it to a Frenchman named Marc Rebibo. In 1989 he sold the concern to Dominique Duvauchelle. In 2000 the Japanese toy manufacturer Nikko purchased 49% of Meccano. They marketed the erector sets until they sold their interests back to Meccano SN of France in 2007. Meccano SN now manufactures in France and China and markets the toys world wide.
"The Erection Specialists" trucks are all over the UK. I saw one of those trucks for the guys who set up and tore down the outdoor seating at the British Open in 1995 at St Andrews Scotland.
Much too late, but the difference is between decodable readers and predictable readers.
ReplyDeleteDecodable readers are easy to decode. The fat cat sits on a mat with a rat. Lots of simple phonics. Predictable readers are easy to predict and use a lot of very common sight words. This can range from Dick and Jane - See Spot. See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Run, run, run! - to the sorts of stories kids write at that age - I like cats. I like dogs. I like birds. I do not like snakes.