Tongues, if you are kitchen cool.
But you also use it for more than just turning — for example, you use it to transfer food from the pan to the plate. Depending on what you’re cooking you may use it to mix or spread the food in the pan.
In my variant of English it’s a spatula. It it has slots in the blade it’s a fish slice, which is not something different from a spatula, but rather a particular kind of spatula.
How about those of us who are used to calling it a pancake turner keep right on calling it a pancake turner, and those who want to call it a spatula instead call it a spatula? If it doesn’t bother you that you’re using the same word for two distinctly different things, why does it bother you what name some want to use to distinguish them?
“Pancake turner” has over 2,600,000 hits on Google, one of the first of which is a definition in the Oxford dictionary, which says it’s been in use at least since the early 17th century. It’s a name for something. Does it make perfect logical sense? It doesn’t have to. Names very often don’t.
See, that’s what I would call a that thing. “Hey, pass me that thing - no, the one next to.the purple spatula. Yeah, that thing.”. I try to always be precise.
Same thing in South Africa. (Warning: nightmare fuel)
If you wanted to disambiguate because it wasn’t clear from context, you might say “hot chips” for the freshly-fried ones. Or “slap chips” if having with battered fish. But the packaged snacks are chips, and anyone who calls packet chips “crisps” is clearly foreign.
And at the other end of the carriage, the ‘bonnet’ covers the compartment where the hats were kept.
Whole lot of people in this thread have weird names for their egg lifters.
No, “Pancake” “turner” does. “Pancake turner” just has 243 000. There’s a difference.
Their what? I’ve got a drawer full of omelet folders, sandwich spinners, and patty rotators, but I’ve never heard of that one.
Taiwanese call “toast” the kind of bread that you can make toast out of, as well as the finished product. After 17 years together, I still can’t get used to my wife asking me to pick up some toast at the supermarket.
Foreign languages are like that. Japanese only have one word for both “foot” and “leg” while having many different words for “wear” depending on the type of clothes such as shirts, pants, or hats.
Chinese doesn’t have one word for “cousin”, but distinguishes between the children of brothers or sisters and if they are older or younger.
We had a really amazing thread a few years ago about all the various ways different languages have words for relations by blood or marriage. And the amazing range of which attributes they track w different words vs which they subsume under a common term.
I couldn’t come up with a good way to search for the thread or I’d link it here.
I believe they do the same thing in Germany.
Same in Bengali. You have hath (hand/arm), angul (finger), pa (leg/foot), and payer angul (foot-finger). If you want, you can get more specific for “foot”: payer pata (“leaf of the leg”)
In Bengali, you have bhai (brother/younger brother), dada (elder brother), bon (sister/younger sister), and didi (elder sister). That goes for all siblings and cousins from your generation (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc., with no “removals”).
You can be more specific if you want to: you can say “own elder brother” to indicate your actual sibling. Or you can modify with the five types of aunts and uncles:
- jætha-moshai (father’s elder brother)/jethi-ma (his wife)—adjectival form: jætutho-
- kaka (father’s brother/younger brother)/kaki-ma (his wife)—adjectival form: khurtutho-
- pishi-ma (father’s sister)/pishe-moshai (her husband)—adjectival form: pistuto-
- mama (mother’s brother)/mami-ma (his wife)—adjectival form: mamato-
- mashi-ma (mother’s sister)/mesho-moshai (her husband)—adjectival form mastuto-
So, for example, if you were being non-specifc, you could just say didi (elder sister), or you could say khurtuto-didi (father’s younger brother’s daughter who is elder to you).
From another site (and maybe off-topic):
“Arabic does not have a collective noun for camel. There exist separate words for male camel, female camel, castrated camel, young camel, old camel, …”
" In Swedish, there is no word equivalent to grandmother / grandfather . You always have to specify whether you’re referring to a paternal or maternal grandparent."
The Inuit have many words for “snow” - e.g.
- qanuk: ‘snowflake’
- kaneq: ‘frost’
- kanevvluk: ‘fine snow’
- qanikcaq: ‘snow on ground’
- muruaneq: ‘soft deep snow’
- nutaryuk: ‘fresh snow’
- pirta: ‘blizzard’
- qengaruk: ‘snow bank’
You are correct. Plenty of people selling them under that name, though; as well as other references.
As do English speakers:
Snow
Slush
Powder
Drift
Sleet
Flake
Crust
And those are just the ones I could list from memory. I bet Google knows a lot more.
I see “chippies” is a cute slang term of choice too.
Which leads me to another interesting pairing…
“Chippy” - chip that you eat
“Chippy” - carpenter
Not that many people would be confused enough by “my cousin’s a chippy” into thinking your cousin is a fried potato, however…
Until partway through the 20th century, English had no way to refer to brothers and sisters collectively. “Sibling” was a technical term used in anthropology and psychology that only gradually (by say 1975) become a common term in everyday speech.
To sanction something is to give it your approval. Unless you are applying a penalty as a rather concrete way of signalling your disapproval.
No, we’d all assume your cousin is a bimbo. (courtesy of noir detective novels mostly)
???
My slang search is failing me…
Courtesy of Google: