I think the post you quoted was irony: an implication that American yards are so large they would qualify as a paddock to you and I.
But anyway, I’d always understood the word paddock to be Scottish in origin but apparently it comes from Middle English - alteration of Middle English parrok, from Old English pearroc, from Medieval Latin parricus. Live and learn.
For anyone slightly puzzled, an Australian/New Zealand paddock (which can be quite vast) is roughly equivalent to the British field. However I doubt any Brit would comfortably describe 500 fenced ha (1200 acres) as a field because it won’t be lush green grass surrounded by hedgerows - which is what most people think of as a field.
Ah…the long acre, know it well, fenced and grazed it many a time in my boyhood.
Back-to-backs, by definition, do not have backyards (or gardens). Back-to-backs are terraced houses built so that they do not only share their side walls with the adjacent houses, but their back walls too: the back wall of your house will also be the back wall of someone else’s house, that faces out onto the next street. In effect, back-to-backs were built so that an entire block was a single building, divided into multiple houses such that each had its own front door and front windows, but no back door or back or side windows. There was no place for any back yards, although on some designs there might be a communal (paved over) yard down teh street, which, originally, would have housed communal toilets, as the houses, when built, did not have indoor plumbing. (However, I think all back-to-backs that still survive have long since had indoor plumbing installed.)
I do not know if the houses depicted in Coronation Street are actual back-to-backs. They may merely be terraced houses with (paved) backyards, what would originally have been a significant step up in quality and price from back-to-backs. Coronation Street is set in a fictionalized version of Salford, I believe. However, when I lived in Leeds for many years (up to about 20 years ago) there were still many streets of true back-to-back houses that were still in use, and I dare say many still exist.
There are some National Trust preserved back-to backs in Birmingham where the front terrace does face the street, but the back terrace faces a courtyard which contains the privies and communal wash house. So those do have “yards”.
I thought a back-to-back was also a house where the yard or the garden backed directly into another home’s yard or garden, without a road or alleyway in between.
Of course, the word for what we in London call an alley or alleyway is different in the Corrie area too…
This link takes you to the National Trust back-to-back website. There are a couple of pictures on there that show the courtyard and one which shows the terrace that faces the street:-
I said there may be communal yards, but if an individual house has a back yard it is not a back-to-back (by definition). I think in the cases you are talking about, the house on one side has its front door opening onto the street, and the house built on the back of it has its front door opening on the communal courtyard.
You are mistaken. (Or, if there are people who use “back-to-back” to mean this, they are conflating two very different sorts of housing.)
Heck, most middle class detached or semi-detached houses in Britain probably have their garden backing directly onto another house’s garden, with no alleyway. These can be quite posh. The house I live in currently is terraced, with a garden behind backing onto another house’s garden, with no alley. No way is it a back-to-back. It is several cuts above the actual back-to-backs I am familiar with from Leeds. A back-to-back is a much inferior form of housing where, as I said, the back wall of the house itself (as well as the side walls) is shared. Many British towns may never have had any, and many that once existed have long since been torn down as slums, so many British people may not be familiar with them, but they were once common in the northern industrial cities.
Here is a Google maps view of some back to back terraces in Leeds. It is an area I am familiar with. You can see the communal yards about every four houses along the block, which would once have been where the toilet facilities were. It looks like they are still used communally for dustbins. (I am fairly sure I also remember seeing back-to-backs in Leeds where the whole block was, effectively, a single building, with no yards at all, but perhaps those were built with indoor plumbing originally.)
Note that that Google image search for “garden” returns pictures of particularly beautiful or photogenic gardens, not of what Americans would think of as “typical” gardens.
It’s odd how differently Americans use the term garden. As a noun we think of it as a vegetable patch. A couple rows of corn, some purple hull peas, melons, tomatoes, and squash. A typical Southern garden.
As a verb, gardening is the actual work in the entire yard. Sounds weird but fertilizing the lawn or trimming the shrubs is gardening. Just like tilling, seeding, and hoeing is gardening.
<shrug> I know the word originally came from the English. It’s meaning just got altered a bit in the U.S.
Fair enough, back-to-back is more meaningful as a term if it means the buildings themselves back onto each other. I have heard it used otherwise, though, and according to the earlier wiki link I’m not alone. The terraces I’m used to mostly have an alley or road separating the gardens.
I’m wondering about that “we” in your second sentence. I am certainly American and I do not think of a garden as a vegetable patch. It can be a vegetable patch, but it could just as easily be a flower garden. I call the plantings around my home a garden. These plantings are composed of annual and perennial flowers, ornamental foliage plants and shrubs. Other than a few container tomatoes, I do not grow vegetables.
A vegetable garden is probably the first thing I’d think of (as in “Mr. McGregor’s garden” in The Tale of Peter Rabbit), but flower gardens are also common (and herb gardens and rock gardens aren’t unheard of). Either way, though, it’s typical for Americans to have a section of their (back) yard set aside as a garden.
Plus, I wouldn’t use the word “gardening” to refer to fertilizing the lawn or trimming the shrubs. I’d probably call it “yard work,” if I needed a word to refer to it.
If it was the typical (around here) back yard, with a deck , patio or (more rarely) porch up against the house and then an expanse of lawn with flowers and shrubs restricted to the perimeter, I would call it the “yard”. If there were flowers, shrubs, fountains, paved areas, furniture, etc scattered throughout the lawn , I would call the whole thing a “garden”
Yeah, I’ve never heard an American refer to cutting the grass and trimming the bushes as “gardening.” That’s “yard work.” “Gardening” is looking after flowers or vegetables.
If we’re talking Anglo/American linguistic differences - what about Americans dropping the ‘h’ on 'erbs. That always sounds so strange to me. And, frankly, French.
