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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![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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 toservalan 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 atsebastienne'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.
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.
no subject
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
childperson indeed. :-D