You mean like bear and bear?
A few years ago, I was preparing to run a Dungeons & Dragons adventure, which had been written for one of Wizards of the Coast’s “organized play” campaigns (i.e., adventures which can be run at game store and conventions, as well as at home).
While reading through it, to familiarize myself with the storyline and the adversaries, I came across a line (paraphrasing), “Ogmar (one of the non-player characters in the adventure) broke his leg while escaping through a first-floor window.” I thought to myself, “really? What a klutz!,” picturing the dude going out a window that was no more than four or five feet above ground level, and still managing to seriously injure himself.
And, then, something in the back of my mind reminded me that, in European countries, “first floor” =/= “ground floor.” I looked up the information on the adventure’s author, and sure enough, they were English. So, poor Ogmar had fallen at least ten, maybe fifteen, feet from that window, making a broken leg far more likely.
Maybe not like that— were those ever pronounced differently from each other?
Lead and lead, perhaps (well, it would be if some people pronounced them the same)
O.k. two more I’ve remembered. In the UK, greedy is often a synonym for gluttonous. I’ve never it heard used in the US than anything other than the pecuniary.
And babies grizzling??? That confused me for a long time. I thought it meant drooling because that’s what the word suggested to me. But one book had more context, and I think it’s more like crying or whining?
Fair warning: It’s a nearly 23 minute video.
They have different PIE roots, so I would suspect so. But it may have been a long time ago.
It is actually harder to hear dialog than it used to be, for everyone. For a complex of reasons including different sound mixing, style of delivery toward more realism (aka mumbling and whispering), and technological changes.
Some polls show around 80% of people now use subtitles for their own language.
I always have the subtitles on no matter what kind of show I watch. I am old and I can’t hear and understand like I did when I was younger. Nothing wrong or amusing about that.
Correct. A grizzly baby is an unhappy one.
j
Grizzly is also more or less an adjective used exclusively to describe an upset baby. You wouldn’t use it to describe an adult, unless deliberately (and possibly quite meanly) infantilising them.
OB
Yes, that’s the only way I’ve seen it used – for babies.
But, if it’s “mizzling” there as a fine rain falling.
Many places in the US, too, especially where there’s some ambiguity about which floor is “first”. For instance, at the school where I’m teaching now, the bottommost floor is slightly below the surrounding ground level, and then there are big ornate outdoor steps up to the main entrance on the floor above that. We call the lowest floor “ground” and the floor with the main entrance “first”. Also seen in buildings on hilly ground, where there can be an entrance on multiple floors.
The vowel in “so” is a diphthong (unless you’re from Yorkshire). “So” and “sow” (seeds) are homophones in every modern English accent I know of. There’s nothing dirty about it (although you may get your hands dirty while sowing).
One subtle difference in the meaning of the word “horrible”. In the US, a horrible teacher would be one who is very bad at teaching. In Britain, they may be a perfectly competent teacher but you would not want them to be your teacher.
By contrast, a terrible or awful teacher would be bad at teaching on both sides of the ocean.
So horrible refers to their character as opposed to their skills?
The “dirty” part is in comparison to the open vowel finish in other languages. The one I know about is Italian, but I think there are others.
Probably true, but in my family at least, anybody of any age but in a younger generation who remained upset without good and recent cause would be told to “stop grizzling”.
This might be obsolete, but in early 20th century fiction I’ve read where if someone said they’re “on the telephone”, they didn’t mean that they were actively using it at that moment. Instead, they meant that they had a telephone in their house, i.e. that they were “on” the telephone system.
Which makes the scene in Paddington where Mr. Brown describes the title character to his insurance agent somewhat baffling for American viewers:
Grizzly? Not particularly. Mind you, I haven’t seen him in the mornings.
That’s why I love the term “rubbish”. The English imbue it with such feeling.
While I’ve got your attention, I’d just like to thank everyone here for the most entertainment I’ve had in quite a while!
But, as a yank that became addicted to British comedy as a wee lad, I should also thank the casts of Beyond the Fringe, Monty Python, The Goon Show, Cabin Pressure, oh, and Mitchell and Webb, Fry and Laurie, Barratt and Fielding, Morecambe and Wise, Steptoe and Son…
… as a result of being immersed in those from an early age, I’ve “sussed out” the meanings of so many of the Britishisms here.