“Pop” is a midwestern usage. Most of the country calls it “soda.”
Hey, I come from “pop” country myself, but you can’t even get a majority of Americans to agree to that one.
Pop - and the naming of - is a regional thing in the UK. Honestly, this thread has the air of a few people who’ve watched maybe two episodes of “Quirky Brit Show, Yeah?” and :dubious:
Around these parts, it’s called “coke” (well, they come out of a Coke Machine, don’t they?).
So, Americans don’t want their cars to be happy? 
Not sure if it’s been mentioned above (this thread is getting lengthy, and my memory isn’t what it was) and I’m not sure what it is in Britain, in Australia it’s “take away” compared to the US “take out”. For some reason (tv probably) “take out” is creeping in here and I find it annoying. What do Americans DO with their meals on their dates when they take them out? Dancing? A movie?
The area around us called X Park*. It has a park. It’s call X Park Park. If you drive there you park in the X Park Park parking lot. Say that 6 times quickly. Compare to “X Park Park Car Park” 6 times quickly. The first one is easier.
Case closed.
- Which Google, and therefore a large part of the Internet, thinks is in another part of the state.
Under UK law only jobs can become redundant. People are dismissed by reason of redundancy.
The usage of people being made redundant comes from lazy journalism decades ago.
Of course, the law may be different outside the UK.
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David Brent: “Don’t make me redundant.”
Regardless of the legal definition, this meaning represents how I’ve always encountered it in British media, as a sacking, that maybe comes with some severance benefits.I’d always thought (for no real reason) that redundancy related to the business contracting. Maybe dropping some lines, maybe shrinking demand overall, things like that.
If not, what would you call it when the company simply doesn’t have enough work to employ six bloggle stompers anymore and fires one of them?
It’s not easy to lose your job through incompetency in the UK. If that happens you probably would have received a formal warning or two first.
However you wouldn’t be made redundant.
You’d be sacked or - more formally - dismissed.
Redundancy is very specific in that it relates to your job role and you’d be paid a minimum of a week’s wage for every year you’d spent at the company. When I was made redundant (my company moved to a different city and I chose not to relocate) I got 6 months pay tax free. Very different from being sacked!
If I interviewed someone that said they were made redundant I would absolutely take it to mean it was a business situation and had absolutely no bearing on that person’s attitude or ability.
Redundancy in the UK and EU has a very specific meaning, but lots of folk think that it means selecting an individual for dismissal, which it does not.
Redundancy is a process where various stages must be processed before there is any loss of employment.
Firstly, posts and roles are made surplus to requirements, but there are rules about how this is done. If a post does qualify for termination, the post holder must then be assessed for the possibility of a change of role - so this means assessing alternatives, and may require skills matching, along with necessary training for the former post holder to achieve the requirements of another position.
There would also be an assessment of the chance of reasonable deployment to another location - this also has specific rules, so it is not acceptable to deny redundancy (and possible compensation) because the only other available post just happens to be 100 miles away.
Posts cannot be made redundant simply to cut the number of employees whilst dropping the workload on other employees unless there is a technical arrangement - such as the use of new equipment.
However, lots of the rules can be circumvented if an employer is in a bankruptcy defence situation, and if there is a company takeover - what often happens in the latter is that the taking over organisation will have different working practices and job roles that are not compatible with those in the taken over organisation - there is usually some sort of job matching process where roles are assessed on a percentage scale, if the employees role achieves 51% of the new role then they cannot be made redundant - instead they must be trained up to the remaining 49% of the role.
I’ve dealt with far too many redundancies , usually privatisations of public sector roles, and the incoming company has suddenly faced a huge cut in the work they contracted to do and they end up carrying a huge financial cost in making staff redundant because those staff have transferred rights such as length of service - these have a massive impact on the amount of redundancy compensation - its a way of transferring redundancy costs from the public sector on to naive privatising companies.
It is not unusual for workers to put themselves forward for redundancy if they already have long service in an organisation because of the large compensation they can get - please bear in mind that redundancy payments often amount to only a small amount of a total payout because many companies also have addition redundancy protection schemes which are not defined by the national minimum levels.
Its a frequently serious problem that redundancy situations usually lead to the most experienced staff leaving because they end up with bigger payouts, and it can cause massive organisational problems - I could name a number of organisations that are in a state of serious crisis, including one where 77% of the current workforce had less than 1 years experience - in an industry where it would usually be considered essential to have 5-10 years experience. I won’t name that organisation, but it shows an extreme effect of offering redundancy without careful consideration.
This discussion has begun to repeat itself.
If only there were a word for that.
Ok, moving away from that redundant argument (which I kinda wished I hadn’t brought up):
One I got from “the register” UK
‘Punter’ meaning a client or customer. There seems to be some debate whether it is a bit derogatory or not. If it is, then I definitely approve using this term.
You have a US analogue? It looks like the source meaning of punter in that usage would be bettor, so, “mark”?
I’m going by the second definition here:
which is how The Register used it.
OK, ok, I am late to this party (as usual), but I thought of this one today and it’s too good to let go.
UK: Boaty McBoatface
US: RV Neil Armstrong
Problem is, I can’t declare a winner. I mean, Boaty McBoatface is always good for a laugh (every time), but, I mean, Neil Armstrong.
The UK term is older, however. A park was originally an enclosed area set aside as a game preserve. The “enclosed area” meaning spread in the late 1600s to describe both enclosed areas around manor houses and enclosed areas in which military supply wagons and artillery carriages were temporarily stored (parked) between wars (Artillery Park baseball field in Pennsylvania was originally such a military park). Recreational parks were named due to the similarity in appearance to the manor parks, while car parks were used for temporary vehicle storage like the military parks. Parking lot is a longer, less direct description of the area in which cars are parked.
Advantage UK - snappier and equally correct.
A verge is sort of the opposite of a shoulder, because a verge is grassy (or at least planty) whereas a shoulder is paved (or at least not planty). The US has a plethora of other terms which we can’t agree on to describe the grassy side of a road between the [part where you drive on] and the [part where you walk on]. I’d still give it to the UK because they have the plurality of the usage compared to the fractured Americans. I’m going to start calling it a verge and see if it will catch on, since no one taught me a term for this when I was growing up. The few times I’ve had to use it I just say “the grassy part between the sidewalk and the road”.
UK: Scoreless draw
US: Shutout
Result: Umm