Comment on flat housing
notabot@piefed.social 5 hours agoOi! Knock it off bruv!
I’ll have you know that the u in colour is very important. It nake the other o sound more like a u. Furthermore, check is a perfectly good word, but you cant pay with it. For that you need a cheque, and you can’t pay with those in most places now either. You car would have a bonnet and a boot, but a lorry would only have the former. Decending in a lift is no more unexpected than doing so in an elevator, and it significantly fewer letters too.
Now, having sorted out these minor linguistic quirks, would you care for a nice cup of tea and a chat about the weather?
kungen@feddit.nu 5 hours ago
How do you explain pavement (sidewalk, the rest of the roads are also usually paved), windshield (windscreen? A window screen has holes in it!), jumper (it’s a shirt, why would it be jumping?), etc!
notabot@piefed.social 1 hour ago
These are mostly code words designed to keep those pesky foreigners confused.
Pavement comes from the latin root “pavire” meaning to tread down. Vehicles drive on the road, a word which may stem from a proto-indo-european root meaning “to ride”. If there’s one thing we like more than tea, it’s tradition, and millennia old words really scratch that itch. Besides, only crabs walk on a sidewalk, or do you lot all shuffle along like you’re trying to get through a narrow gap?
Windscreen is, again, perfectly logical when you consider that in the 14th century “screen” referred to a barrier that might be used to block draughts. If it was a good enough word 700 years ago, it’s good enough now by Jove!
I must take exception to your description of a jumper being a shirt. A jumper does not open at the front, and so cannot possibly be compared to a shirt, whose defining feature is the opening, typically finished with a placket on each side, unless it’s a tee-shirt, but it’s too chilly to wear those here, so we don’t talk about them. The garment you are referring to is, of course, a cardigan. Both the jumper and the cardigan do share the trait of being a made of a heavier material, or knitted, often by your Granny, out of heavy wool.
ohulancutash@feddit.uk 3 hours ago
This kind of childlike literalism is why the colonial darlings call train drivers “engineers”. Not because they have skill in engineering, but because they operate “engines”.