fox

So it's interesting to me that although we mostly don't have grammatical gender in English, we do have some words with inherent gender but no neutral alternative (which other gendered words do have). Viz:

mother, father, parent
sister, brother, sibling
daughter, son, child

But:

niece, nephew, _____
aunt, uncle, _____

And, interestingly, _____, _____, cousin.

I wonder why we can have gender-neutral terms for the immediate family but not for the slightly extended one. Bit of a drag.

I was going to use animal terms here, too, which is also interesting:
mare, stallion, horse
filly, colt, foal
cow, bull, _____ (cattle, sure, but that's a mass rather than a count noun; you can't specify one gender-neutral adult animal, and maybe not juveniles either - is it heifer, calf, _____ or heifer, _____, calf?)
ewe, ram, sheep
_____, _____, lamb
?nanny, billy, goat? (can you say "a nanny" or does it have to be "a nanny goat"?)
_____, _____, kid
?bitch, dog, _____? (rarely used anymore, of course, and/so people would probably correct me to bitch, _____, dog if they're prepared to use "bitch" in the canine sense at all)
_____, _____, pup
_____, _____, wolf
?vixen, _____, fox?
?_____, tom, cat?
_____, _____, kitten
hen, cock, bird/fowl (is this true of all birds and just generally not used for most of the little flying ones?)
_____, _____, chick
?jenny, mule, _____? (or jenny, ____, mule?)
sow, hog, pig
_____, _____, piglet
... we don't give a shit about the genders of fish, do we.

1. you look to the right before stepping out into the street, and are almost hit by a car approaching from the left
   
2. you say 'sorry' instead of 'excuse me' when you need someone to move aside so you can get by
   
3. the money seems a little strange to you; like, it's okay that it's all the same color, but you find it frustrating that it's all the same size
   
4. you find a medium-sized moderately upmarket grocery store (dcfolk and those further south, think harris teeter) totally bewildering in terms of size and selection

i'm thinking of it this way:  just imagine how happy i'll be (for, you know, the first week or so) when i'm back to stay.  :-D

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.

i'm way more willing to adjust my vocabulary than my pronunciation. this is not a huge surprise, but there it is. i'll say hiya instead of hi, for example, especially to a person behind a counter at a sandwich shop (or similar person in service capacity). i'm doing very well remembering to say i've got instead of i have. and so forth. if the local dialect has a word i don't have at all, fine (see lorry, arguably trousers, certainly bap -- a round bun to put sandwiches on); but even if the local dialect word is a word that means something else in my own dialect, i'm perfectly happy to make the switch (the perennial jam/jelly confusion; also lemonade, salad, even paper in the academic sense -- here, a "paper" is an exam, and what i know as a paper is an essay). but i can't get to where i feel normal changing the way i pronounce things -- it's as much a matter of not wanting people to think i'm mocking them (also called taking the piss, an expression it's very difficult for me to use convincingly) or trying to fit in where i don't as it is of being stubborn and clinging to my own accent; i know i can get it back. still, the only time i say tomato with a low back "a" ah is when i've just said tomato with a mid front "a" ay and i'm about to suggest calling the whole thing off.

[eta: ooh, i remember another good one: scheme. british english uses "scheme" the way we'd use program or plan -- it takes some concentration to keep in mind that an insurance scheme, for instance, is in no way sinister. of course, they do also use the word "plan"; but then, where we use "scheme", they tend to use something like plot, and we can have "plot" in that situation as well. completely unrelated example: couple weeks ago in semantics we were reading a bit of ... wittgenstein? bah, who remembers ... talking about games, what makes a game, etc., and on the question of whether opponents were necessary, the text said "But consider patience." i had to look helplessly around the room until someone told me: solitaire. ah, dialects!]

what i can't do, and this is very frustrating to me, is react quickly enough to get what's up? and [you] all right? right. these questions have opposite meanings in britain and north america; to me, the first question means "how's it going" and the second means "are you okay", while around here (as i learned the hard way when i was in edinburgh, through weeks of confusion between self and flatmates), the first question means "what's wrong" and the second means "hello". i can respond correctly to "y'alright?" when i hear it, but i cannot, cannot, cannot train myself to produce it. this is very frustrating. i've been trying not to say "what's up" at all, since while americans understand it the same way i say it, brits are often knocked for a conversational loop -- but i can't get myself to say "hi, y'alright?" it's not that it sticks in the craw; it's that the conversational muscle memory just isn't there. should probably think about switching to "how's it going", which i believe is an unloaded phrase.