Road.
I think the answer is road surfacing or paving, non?
This is for US also. Although both can be paved, whence this little discussion, perhaps. I think that that’s what they call it when the fix up a pavement, and you want to write your name in the cement.
:smack: Sorry, get what you mean now. Tarmac is still quite widely used as the name for the actual material used for roads.
There’s also Asphalt, Concrete, and Macadam, although I rarely hear anyone younger than about 60 using that last one.
Tar macadam is a perfectly cromulent term.
Hmm, Swedish has borrowed a large part of its vocabulary from Plattdeutch and here it means to run. On the other hand it can have changed meaning in Northern Germany after it was exported.
I’ve always associated “tarmac” with large areas–runways, etc.–in military contexts. But that might be just me.
Right, but just to be clear (I know this was already mentioned), UK folks tend to use “pavement” when US folks would say “sidewalk.”
Mud room ???
A little alcove by the back door when you first come in to stomp the mud off your overboots and take them off if you need to.
A mud room is a small anteroom intended for leaving wet or muddy boots or shoes. It might be adjacent to a back or side entrance, to the kitchen, to the garage, or to the front entrance. They’re not very common in modern houses or in crowded cities.
Have just noticed this post. I learned of these words on holiday a good many years ago – in a different part of Scotland, but my landlady was from the north-east. She elaborated that the standard greeting in those parts, is “Fit like, loon / quine?” I at first parsed that as meaning “[Are you feeling] fit [and well], like?”; but she explained that actual significance is, “What (=‘fit’) [is life ] like [for you today]?”
I do gather that the speech of folk in rural north-east Scotland, is English, but of a kind hardly recognisable or comprehensible to anyone else in the Anglosphere !
The “limonada” matter – brings to mind a thread on another board, which I was reading lately. Started with a post to the effect that in Latin American Spanish, the words for “lemon” and “lime” were, so to speak, reversed vis-a-vis English: a lemon was “lima”, and a lime was “limon”. Other posters from various countries in the region chimed in, with their different versions of limes / lemons / variations thereon; and the end result was, rather, chaos and confusion.
Any thoughts on the matter, from folk here acquainted with Spanish-speaking countries (including metropolitan Spain) would be received with interest.
Indeed confusing. I’ve been using and reading “quite certain” for a long time, and never suspected it meant “totally” certain. I assumed it meant “almost certain” or something like that, that it expressed a doubt.
Actually i think it is even less straightforward than Colophon suggests. If said with emphasis on the quite, “quite certain” might indeed express a doubt, and be more of less equivalent to “fairly certain”; if the emphasis is on the certain, or there is no particular stress, it does indeed mean “absolutely certain”. When written, however, unless the quite is italicized, you can be reasonably certain that it means “absolutely certain”.
They aren’t? Standard part of any house or flat where I live if I understood your description of them.
I was once asked by a Scottish friend if I really did understand what T. from Elgin was saying as she didn’t. The thing is that M., who is from Glasgow, also has a very heavy accent, so I, who is not a native speaker, had to concentrate hard on understanding both of them.
I’ve never seen an apartment with a mudroom.
I’ve only seen them in manor houses and one fairly ordinary house where they’re referred to as a boot room but are the exact room you describe.
A mudroom isn’t just the entrance to a house. Most houses and apartments around here have some kind of space around the entrance, but not a mud room. Especially, in an apartment, where space is at a premium, it would be unusual to have a mud room.
If you’re talking about a modern house, if someone mentions having a mud room, I would assume that it’s the residence of a fairly wealthy person.