Final, final note: Private colleges as well as major universities do research, though perhaps not on the same scale. At Macalester, one student won a prestigious award in astronomy for his work on whether or not asteroids have satellites; every time I walked through the biology department at Mac, I would see tenured professors hard at work in their labs doing their own studies.
Research is associated more with large universities simply because they have larger facilities, more grant money, and lots of graduate* students doing their master’s and doctoral works.
*Post-graduate elsewhere.
Some establishments, like diners and convenience stores, will have a small dish filled with pennies by the cash register. If you’re short a few cents in paying your bill, you’re allowed to take coins from the dish (within reason) to make up the difference.
On the other hand, if you pay your bill and get pennies in change, you’re encouraged to leave them in the dish to extend the same courtesy to future customers. Many people can’t be bothered carrying around large numbers of pennies (or any other small change), so they drop them in the dish willingly and later feel good about themselves.
Metaphors, comparisons, jokes etc. which are taken from American sports like baseball and football are often somewhat obscure to a mainstream European audience.
Some things that I took some time to figure out from items of US popular culture (but mostly from books or articles, rarely from movies):
references to ‘room temperature IQ’ - that’s a much more severe impairment in Celsius
the ‘freshmen/sophomores’ etc. nomenclature for school/university stages
using the terms ‘student’, ‘class’ and ‘school’ with reference to all stages of education (in German there is a sharp terminological distinction between primary/secondary education on the one hand and tertiary on the other). It doesn’t help that German has cognates for all three terms.
references to a student cohort as ‘class of [year in the future]’ (thinking isn’t that tempting fate?)
Often you’re obliged to use a modifier to differentiate; e.g., “He’s a high school student, while is sister is already a college student.”
“School” can apply to any level of education; if you’re going to some specialized institution, you again use a modifier: “I graduated from law school, and my wife is taking a course at a local art school.”
“Pupil” is usually used for a private student, protege, or disciple: “I have a new piano pupil who gets lessons three times a week.” “I’m a pupil of Dr Jung’s school of psychiatry.”
Where I grew up, even children who were still in primary/elementary school were referred to as “students.”
It’s like saying “20-20 hindsight.” The quarterback is responsible for making a split-second decision on where to throw the ball, and most football games are played (and televised) on Sundays.
In other words, its easy to see things clearly on Monday morning, when it’s too late to do anything about it.
Some other roughly equivalent expressions are “armchair strategist” and “closing the barn door after the horses have gotten out.”
Interesting. I would use monday-morning quarterback to mean someone who’s not an expert and doesn’t have any skin in the game explaining why those who are and do are wrong to do what they did.
Closing the barn door after the horse got out would be someone who does something too late for it to be of any use.
There really isn’t anything exact or literal about it! As a couple of people have pointed out some cultures and people have no concept of flipping the egg over. Our idea of a “fried egg” is what you guys call “sunny side up” and that’s it. In order for “over easy” to be obvious you first have to know what an over easy egg is. (Oh and breaking the yolk is bad and some people would simply throw the egg away and start over, so unbroken yolk is taken for granted.)
Then we come to “easy” – without difficulty or effort – not breaking the yolk actually sounds a bit harder than just flipping it any old how so it breaks. The sense in which “easy” is being used here seems to correspond to definition 9 here
This definition strikes me as a particularly American use of the word, not the first thing I would think of.
As for “flip grilled”, for a start what we call “grilling” in the UK is what you lot call broiling, so, no, this is not obvious either. Does “flipping” mean turning it over? Well what other way is there to grill stuff eh?
What is happening here is that some people are so immersed in their own cultures way of doing things that they do not know how to explain it, to break it down, for an outsider.
Somehow, it is baseball terms that I find more baffling that football. I don’t know why, because baseball is no harder to understand than football, indeed it closely resembles the game rounders which most Brits have played. But baseball seems like cricket in its love of jargon and acronyms. It still don’t completely get what “RBI” really means, for example. When I first encountered it there was no Google, and eventually I learned that it stood for “runs batted in”. But batted in what? Batted in shorts? Batted in July?
Eventually I surmised that it either means “in” in the directional sense, i.e. “runs that came IN to home plate while the batter was batting”, so he “batted them in”, or it means “in” in the inclusive sense, i.e. runs scored IN which the player was batting.
It took me ages to work out what a nickle and dime actually were worth. It’s generally obvious from context that they’re small, not very valuable coins, but the actual number of cents they represent? No need to say, everyone knows that!
High school football is what takes the place of junior sports and semi-pro leagues in other countries. Most of the leagues are organized around school teams until you get to the college level, unlike Europe and other places where sports leagues are independent of the town or school system.
Basically every town or area has a high school, and in the days before television, the only way most people could see a sporting event would be to go to the local stadium on Friday night and see their local school play some other nearby school. Since a lot of small-town people had attended the school and lived in the community, and many may even have children, nephews or grandchildren on the team, there’s a lot of civic pride around the local high school teams.
Homecoming is I think, a relic of when college football teams would go on extended road trips, and there would be a “homecoming” celebration upon their return. High schools have just adopted this as their own, even though none that I’m aware of go on anything other than maybe an overnight trip.
