Shared posts

13 Oct 13:33

On the Phone

'No idea what I was thinking! Haha! But anyway, maybe we should check out what this Ba'al guy has to say.'
14 Jun 13:19

Phone Alarm

Who's calling me?? WHY IS THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD CALLING ME!?
14 Jun 13:09

sandwiches, more particularly bacon sandwiches

by lynneguist
On Fridays, I sit and work in a cafe with a little group of writing friends, and I've got(ten) into the habit of ordering the same thing for lunch each week (just because it makes calorie-counting easier). Giving me what I've ordered has, alas, not become the habit of the (AmE) waitstaff. So, when my special order was agreed-to but not delivered at a new cafe, I grumpily posted the following on Facebook:



To quote myself, from the previous toast post:
Now, I endeavo(u)r to maintain a descriptive rather than prescriptive attitude toward(s) language on this blog, but I have no hesitation in being prescriptive about toast.
That little Facebook post generated more than 40 comments and 2 additional Facebook posts that afternoon. Then I tweeted about it.  All of this was pretty catastrophic for my productivity that day. But, TOAST!

There are two cross-cultural differences that may have triggered my unsatisfactory lunch. The first is a fairly linguistic problem: the on.  The second is a culinary-cultural problem that is linguistic to the extent that it involves the meaning of sandwich.  And appended to that is the bacon sandwich problem.

Problem 1:  on 
The on problem is that I used an AmE meaning for on in my on toast. This usage would be recogni{s/z}ed by a lot of Brits from television, hearing people order a pastrami on rye or some such. (See my past discursion about semantic drift in the naming of pastrami sandwiches here. Note: I've never seen a sandwich on rye bread anywhere but on American television while in the UK.) But on is not what would be said in BrE, especially for toast, because this idiomatic use of on clashes with BrE use of on toast, as in scrambled egg on toast. There, the egg is put on a slice of toast*, but no sandwich is made. (Americans might call it an open-face(d) sandwich--on toast.)

Some overly pedantic British commenters at my FB/Twitter posts (you know who you are) insisted that I had asked for a bacon sandwich placed on top of a piece of toast.* I call them 'overly pedantic' because while I may not always get what I want when I place this order, no one has ever tried to give me a sandwich atop a piece of toast. It is a possible interpretation, but not one that any waiter would go for. To make it known that I wanted the sandwich bread to be toasted, my English friends tell me I should say with toast, but I fear that I might get a side order of toast in this case. I have since had success asking for (and receiving) my sandwich by saying "could the bread be toasted, please?"

If I had said I wanted a toasted bacon sandwich, I would have got(ten) another thing: cooked bacon put between bread and then heated in a (BrE) sandwich toaster/(AmE) [toasted] sandwich maker (or more recently: panini maker). At one of the cafes we work in, such sandwiches are pre-assembled and put in an opaque, label(l)ed bag, which one can select and then hand to the person at the counter, who toasts it for you. It's ok, but not as good as a bacon sandwich on/made with toast. This is my opinion. Or it may be a fact.

Problem 2: the sandwich problem
I've dealt with the sandwich problem before at the baked goods post. Let me just quote myself again:
As an American, I can make a sandwich using sliced bread, a roll, a bagel, whatever. In the UK, sandwiches are made with sliced bread, and anything else is called by the name of the bread it's in--for example, a ham and cheese baguette. A bacon roll is bacon inside a roll that's been sliced in half (usually with ketchup or brown sauce), and is a popular hangover treatment.
Add to the list of things Americans can make sandwiches with: toast. You might think that's the same thing as sliced bread. You might be wrong. (I love this old Calvin & Hobbes comic that recogni{s/z}es that it isn't.)  I have seen British sandwiches toasted (again: the old toastie post), but I can't recall seeing any made with toast. Lots of open-faced things on toast (eggs, sautéed mushrooms, [AmE] canned/[BrE] tinned spaghetti or beans, about which another post must be written), but not with another piece of bread on top.  Americans make lots of sandwiches with toast, particularly when breakfast foods are involved. I couldn't believe it the first time I saw Better Half make a fried egg sandwich with untoasted bread and ketchup.

Of course, when such disagreements occur, one is bound to hear an English person say 'but we invented the sandwich, so we get to say what it is'. I note/ask here (a) putting things between bread was happening a long time before the 4th Earl of Sandwich had the thing named after him, (b) who is this we who invented [or named] sandwiches? You weren't there. The world of foodstuffs-between-bread has changed between the 18th century and now, and you weren't even around for most of that. It's like when football fans (of either type) say "we won!" No, you didn't. You watched someone else win. You may have enjoyed it, but you didn't do it. But there is no doubt that the English are serious about sandwiches. Here's one of three sandwich-filled fridges in a shop in Brighton station. My American food sensibilities generally keep me from buying any of them.




One of my English FB friends responded to my desire for a bacon sandwich on toast with "No such thing. A sandwich is a sandwich, on toast is on toast." To which some Americans replied "but a club sandwich is always on toast". I'm not sure that's always absolutely true (but Wikipedia seems to agree with them), but it is typical. And it's something that's escaped the attention of some dictionary-writers, including the OED:



Problem 2': the bacon butty problem
The other thing that Americans said was: "a BLT is always best on toast". So here is the crux of our problem. Not only do we have different sandwich cultures. We have very specific different bacon sandwich cultures.

To Americans, the prototypical bacon sandwich is the BLT (or bacon lettuce and tomato sandwich).  It's usually made with mayonnaise and the bread is usually toasted. Like so:



To the English, the prototypical bacon sandwich  is the bacon butty aka bacon sarnieJust bacon and optionally ketchup or brown sauce on (usually) buttered, untoasted bread (supposedly brown sauce is the more northern way to have it, but most people I know down south prefer it that way too, as do I). (The Wikipedia entry for this is pretty [BrE] rubbish. C'mon UK Wikipedians! Priorities!) This (orig. AmE in this sense) guy took this photo to celebrate his Father's Day breakfast:





And this picture looks just like what I get in the cafes, but they give me much less bacon (which is good for the calorie-counting, not so good for the sandwich). I must note here that in both the non-toasting cafes, the thing on the menu was bacon butty.  So my whole trying-to-get-toast thing was probably doomed from the start.

   


* According to GloWBE, slice of toast is much more common in BrE (63 instances) than in AmE (8), but both can have a piece of toast. The differences are not so clear if one looks at piece/slice of bread.

P.S. [6 June 2014] I forgot about rounds! In BrE, people talk about rounds of toast and rounds of sandwichesI always find this confusing. Here's the Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary definition:

8 (British English) a whole slice of bread; sandwiches made from two whole slices of bread
  • Who's for another round of toast?
  •  two rounds of beef sandwiches
So, if it's toast, it's one slice of bread. But if it's a sandwich it's two. If it's cheese on toast, it's one. If it's a cheese toastie, it's two. Got to get that into my head. Except that I just ordered what is described on the menu at this café as "Toast and jam - a round of white or multi-cereal bread..." And I got two slices.  No wonder I get confused. 

And why rounds of sandwiches? Is there any difference in meaning between two beef sandwiches and two rounds of beef sandwiches?  Answers in a comment, please!








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Until I get my act together and revamp the blog to have this info in a margin, I'm going to continue to commit acts of shameless self-promotion at the ends of posts.

Upcoming talks:
And I'm halfway through my year of providing mini-essays on British idioms to Focus (UK) magazine, if you're interested.
04 Mar 23:35

Meet the Ostracized, Pad-Wearing, Goat's-Blood-Collecting Reproductive Health Hero of Southern India

by Jia Tolentino
by Jia Tolentino

The BBC put up the coolest story you will read all week, maybe, about a man named Arunachalam Muruganantham:

"It all started with my wife," he says. In 1998 he was newly married and his world revolved around his wife, Shanthi, and his widowed mother. One day he saw Shanthi was hiding something from him. He was shocked to discover what it was – rags, "nasty cloths" which she used during menstruation.

"I will be honest," says Muruganantham. "I would not even use it to clean my scooter." When he asked her why she didn't use sanitary pads, she pointed out that if she bought them for the women in the family, she wouldn't be able to afford to buy milk or run the household.

Wanting to impress his young wife, Muruganantham went into town to buy her a sanitary pad. It was handed to him hurriedly, as if it were contraband. He weighed it in his hand and wondered why 10g (less than 0.5oz) of cotton, which at the time cost 10 paise (£0.001), should sell for 4 rupees (£0.04) – 40 times the price. He decided he could make them cheaper himself.

He fashioned a sanitary pad out of cotton and gave it to Shanthi, demanding immediate feedback. She said he'd have to wait for some time – only then did he realise that periods were monthly. "I can't wait a month for each feedback, it'll take two decades!" He needed more volunteers.

It was hard for him to find any. Only 12% of women in India use pads, and in rural areas the "take-up is far less than that. [Muraganantham] was shocked to learn that women don't just use old rags, but other unhygienic substances such as sand, sawdust, leaves and even ash." Additionally:

Women who do use cloths are often too embarrassed to dry them in the sun, which means they don't get disinfected. Approximately 70% of all reproductive diseases in India are caused by poor menstrual hygiene – it can also affect maternal mortality.

Muruganantham kept hitting walls—he was a poor workshop worker, outside the social class of the college students who would be the most likely volunteer testers for his products—so he decided, finally, to test his pads on himself. He made a uterus out of a soccer ball and filling it with goat's blood, and he walked and bicycled and ran all around town with his fake uterus bleeding onto his sanitary pads. Everyone thought he was a diseased pervert! His wife left him! The villagers tried to chain him upside down to a tree to be healed! The rest of the story (he succeeded, four years later!) is marvelous, a truly delightful example of someone using male privilege for the general good. Arunachalam Muruganantham, everybody. We salute you. [BBC]

7 Comments
02 Mar 17:45

Attitudes to dictionaries and the written word

by lynneguist
I've written a new blog post, but it's not here. So if you're interested in thinking about whether dictionaries (and the written word in general) play different roles in the US and UK, then follow this link to OxfordWords, the Oxford dictionaries blog.

Also, as long as I'm here, I've got another springtime talk to add to the list I gave last time. On Tuesday 11 March, I'll be speaking on Sussex University campus as a part of One-World Week on cross-cultural politeness (especially US/UK, but I'd expect we'll go beyond that).  Information here.

And I might as well also mention that we've got a new blog for announcing events put on by Sussex linguists.  So, if you're in the Brighton area and care about these things, have a look at
sussexlinguists.blogspot.co.uk  (though there's not much on there yet.  More to come!).


24 Feb 17:24

Alternate Writers' Residencies

by Jia Tolentino
Shaesays

I didn't really read this, sharing for the cool idea of a writer's retreat on a train.

by Jia Tolentino

Amtrak has begun offering "writers’ residencies" to, well, writers – long roundtrip rides aboard Amtrak trains dedicated solely for the purpose of writing… We can't believe no one thought of this before.  -Atlantic Wire, February 21, 2014

 

Trapped in the Closet Writers' Residency

I get in a closet. I close the door. My god, the absolution, this heady darkness! There are closets and there are closets, but all bring some certain kinship with Chekhov's submerged populations, the individual who has "no longer a society to absorb him," who exists only by his own inner light. Ghosts of the incarcerated float from these walls. A broom is to my right, a hammer to my left, a forgotten winter jacket in front of me. The Swiffer refill box at my feet has not been closed properly; its final cloth has withered. But writing is never clean, is it? I am trapped in this closet and the words flow over me like wine, like bittersweet coffee, like the coffee-scented piss I will mop up with my Swiffer in 45 minutes, the dirt, the pitch, the reek of all our needs.

 

18-Hour Layover Writers' Residency

I was just trying to go home. Aren't we all? I write these thoughts on a napkin, a mere pupa within the chrysalis of this Chili's Too. One is reduced to an animal at the airport, burned down to the bones of bodily instinct. Like a young salmon I have floated through the Delta of this strange river, the holy Spirit that calls all writers directing my path. I found Chili's Too just as my character met her epiphany, and I saw that I was her, that I am my characters and they are me, and I am everyone at Chili's Too, the waiter and Margarita, and I will take another, thanks so much, and I am United with all I meet at this new Frontier of creation.

 

Jennifer Love Hewitt "Stuck Inside a Tanning Bed in I Still Know What You Did Last Summer" Writers' Residency

One of the most beautiful things about choosing writing as my career was realizing that I am writing all the time, particularly when I am not writing, and even when I am nearly sleeping my brain is writing for me. Self-care is writing. Letting the heat build slowly. I am burnished, blinded, transformed.

 

Cross-Country Greyhound Writers' Residency

[notes blurred by tears and chip dust; unreadable]

 

Locked Out of My Apartment Writers' Residency

The bite of outsider status has always prickled within my blood. My mother was an immigrant; my father, too. How many times have they stood where I stand now, on the threshold of an unsteady new home, with the shadows and the structures of centuries massing above them like rainclouds? Those are real rainclouds. Here is the thundersnow. I remove my parka; I am doing this for exposure.

 

The Crate of a Large Sheepdog Writers' Residency

*opens Twitter*

*favs some stuff* lol

I'm the lady with the pet, dawg

*takes selfie*

too much

*retakes selfie*

what that mouth do

*reads stack of applications to writers' residency* sorry we're at capacity

*mentally pictures self flawlessly executing back handspring in "Baby One More Time" video*

ugh really girl GO FUCK YOURSELF

*masturbates*

 

Go Literally Anywhere and Turn Off Your Phone and Write for Awhile, It Probably Won't Be Very Long Because There Is No True Way to Situationally Hack the Hamster-Like Attention Spans of Most Writers in the Age of the Internet (Merely Shackling Yourself to a Bench Somewhere at Like a Public Park or at Zoo or Wherever and Just Seeing Where Your Mind Goes Is a Timeless, Free and Universally Available Option but It's an Obviously Stupid Idea Isn't It) Writers' Residency

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