fox | british dialect notes part 2, and

1. Other words I understand perfectly but can't quite get myself to say include loo, lav, and even toilet, which is of course not at all out of place in British English; fortunately I can ask for the ladies' and raise no eyebrows. Have excised restroom from my vocabulary entirely, and had a brief fling with washroom before abandoning it as well. Wish my fellow Americans would stop saying bathroom. Seems to be a big giant label.

Had a discussion the other night about the British expression pulling (and related to pull and to be on the pull), particularly with relation to the (archaic, i.e. 90's-era) US expression macking. Apparently on the pull and on the mack (note to non-US English speakers: not to be confused with on the make!) are approximately equivalent, and therefore also if a person goes out macking he or she can be accurately described as having gone out pulling. The transitive verbs are very different, however; macking on someone is hitting on him/her, or more likely chatting him/her up. Pulling someone, see, I always understood that to be roughly synonymous with score or pick up; if you pulled the girl, you went home together, and barring some serious performance-related catastrophe, you had sex. Apparently not! I am reliably informed by

cannons_at_dawn that pull just means get off (which solves nothing for me, as I'd assumed that to be a sexual achievement as well), or, after more elucidation, hook up in the high school sense of going off to a corner and making out. (In many US circles, "hook up" also means get laid.) So the standard for success with respect to "pull" is different than I thought it was; you can strike out and still count as having pulled.

Go figure.

Same conversation went on to discuss dekko, shufti, and other leftover colonial slang mysteriously turning up in the speech of people whose parents were born after the British left India.

Later, mentioned to

servalan that it's interesting (to me, anyway) that you can't count quid, while you can count bucks. Both are words I understand fluently, but I don't think I use either; certainly not quid, because I'd feel like an idiot, and I don't think I use buck either, although I suppose I do for approximate amounts less than two dollars ("a buck and a half") and, as

servalan said about herself, "large round-number purchases" ("that'll set you back about a hundred bucks"). Quid is still obviously in routine use in Britain, but not bob, which I suppose went out with the shilling. Any other currency slang? It was also interesting to us that you can count G's but not K, in the world of enumerating thousands.

2. post-mortem, so to speak, on the requiem: it went really well! people came and heard us and said it sounded good; apparently the orchestra was the weak link, which is refreshing. :-) the soloists were excellent, from a chamber choir i'm dying to join; they're the ones i e-mailed to pester for an audition next term. the bass was very good. the soprano had a very sweet voice, which was a nice change from a lot of soprano soloists who feel that higher must equal louder and with a wider vibrato. sadly, above about F# i felt like she went a teensy bit sharp -- strange, eh? not enough to actually sound bad; just enough that i could hear it a leetle bit and wonder if i was going nuts. see previous entry re: spoiled by perfect-pitch-having conductor. the alto was note-perfect, but not really an alto. apparently this is more common than i realize; director at

sebastienne's college chapel choir says Real Altos are very rare. this one was a mezzo-soprano -- she had the range for the parts she was singing, but it's all about the vocal quality. the tenor had a lovely voice and only one leg.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I can ask for the ladies' and raise no eyebrows.

Do you ask for the ladies *room*? I found hearing "toilet" all the time a bit disconcerting, but everyone who heard my American accent ask for the restroom knew what I was talking about. Brits just don't seem to like it being called a "room" for some reason.

Does anyone still say water closet?

i don't say "room", no. and i know they'd know what i meant if i said "restroom", but i have this thing where i feel like i should be the one doing the accommodating, rather than the other way around. when in rome, etc. :-)

i haven't heard anyone say "water closet" or "WC" since i was a kid. heh. had forgotten about those.

I always liked WC when I was there. They know what you mean and it's kinda continental too. I think also because I don't like to use the word toilet unless referring to the the actual toilet.

*reads in fascination*

.....wow. Very cool.

Now i'm going to have to go find notes 1 and any other such things! Very cool.

Ok, so.... if someone is 'on the pull', that means they are 'on the mack'. and the both of them mean.... *slightly confused* ...that... the person is looking for someone to go home with for sex? Being that if you've 'pulled', you got to go home and (apparently) HAVE sex?

Does 'get off' and 'strike out' mean the same thing in the UK as they do in the US?

And quid... its one quid, two quid, three quid vs one buck, two buckS, three buckS?

Interesting! thank you!

no, no -- that's exactly it. if someone is "on the pull", that means they're "on the mack", and both of these expressions mean that the person is looking for someone for a casual social encounter. but if you do "pull", that doesn't necessarily mean you went home and had sex, although i'd always assumed it did.

"get off" can, i believe, mean "have an orgasm" in the UK, as i understand it to in the US; but it can also simply mean "make out", or what they used to call "[heavy] petting". i don't know if "strike out" is in use here at all.

and, yes, that's the point about quid vs. bucks -- one quid, one buck; but three quid, three bucks, plural.

"Toilet" seems to be how to say it up here in Scotland generally; I've adapted, despite a wee bit of squeamishness about it. It just seems so...bold. I still catch myself saying "bathroom" but I have noted a few others doing the same, but always referring to a room that actually had a bath in it.

well, right -- the word "bathroom" exists, but it has to have a bathtub (which i'm learning to think of as "bath" by itself; in my head, "bath" by itself is either what you take instead of a shower, or it's the whole room, but not the fixture) in it (a mere shower is not sufficient); and why we'd ask for the bathroom when all we need is the toilet amuses people sometimes. :-)

also: ICON. heh.

Our choir has a whopping two true altos: one sings tenor, the other bass. Don't get me started. The entire alto section are mezzo-sopranos in disguise--actually, one of our altos is a real soprano and can hit a high C easily, but since we currently have 15 sopranos and nine altos (on those rare occasions when everyone is there), we're quite happy to have her on our side.

your Real Soprano was me in my college choir -- you know how the G above the staff isn't high? the B-flat is high, but not difficult. heh. but! i can read music.

of course, in the chapel choir i mentioned above, i'm a first soprano who on a couple of occasions dropped down to sing first tenor. since the only real tenor in that choir is a second, and the guy who occasionally helps out and sings first tenor but is really an alto (no, it's true) wasn't there at the time.

i've never sung baritone or bass, but from tenor on up, apparently, i'm your girl. :-)

Yeah, the reading music thing is big. Half our sopranos go into a panic any time they don't have the melody.

You must have a pretty wide range, if you can sing tenor. I love singing tenor--there's something fun about going an octave below middle C. I can only sing bass when I have a cold. [g]

Counter-tenors are fabulous. Unfortunately, we don't have any--in fact, we don't have any high tenors. It's too bad.

But I'd be happy if we could just convince the two women with alto voices to sing alto. They'd both sound fabulous.

i can get down to about the E-flat below middle C, sometimes a shade lower -- but not with any volume below about G or F#. but that's okay, because the boys can reach those notes; they needed me for volume on the stuff above middle C, since the things we were singing went up to the G in the treble clef (or would have, but this was a score with both men's parts together, you know, so it was three ledger lines above the bass clef), which is right in my belting-voice.

i swear, when i was a kid, 'pulling' only had the one meaning, and it's only in the last five years or so that to 'pull someone' has meant to 'make out with them' rather than to 'go home with them'.

personally, i don't like it. but then, i don't mind the word 'snog' which most of my friends dismissed as hideous long ago.

see, that makes more sense to me. (actually what would make the most sense would be if "to pull someone" meant to bring them home with you, and if you went home with them, it was because you'd been pulled. but, details.)

if it's the last five years or so, then when i was in edinburgh, i was not misunderstanding everyone around me. thank you, OLM. you are a lovely ~~child~~ person indeed. :-D

british dialect notes part 2, and

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