I first encountered “press” meaning closet when I read Heidi. Airing-cupboard I think I learned from Famous Five books. (Julian Dick Anne, George and Timmy the dog. The song is somehow engraved in my brain when I can’t always keep classes of antihypertensives straight) When my parents put shelves up in the furnace room I said, oh an airing cupboard. I was 9.
Reading extensively as a child means you have a an odd vocabulary.
In the Bridget Jones’s Diary books, Bridget has a co-worker named Perpetua who is forever looking at investment properties. Bridget overhears her complaining to someone about “That is not a fourth bedroom. That is clearly an airing cupboard.”
How could you possibly confuse the two?
You couldn’t. It’s a joke - an absurdity rifting on the high price and unrealistic claims of property vendors in London.
Hmmm.
What’s not to get? That’s precisely what it is. It’s been a running joke in the British consciousness for many years that London property vendors make overweening claims on tiny properties. For example a 6’ x 12’ flat for £170,000. Saying “that’s clearly an airing cupboard” is a joke about that sort of claim, written in a typically Helen Fielding style.
(BTW my iPhone “corrected” ‘riffing’ to ‘rifting’. Weren’t me.)
True, and it makes you good at “Jeopardy.”
The pantry comments raise the question of the difference between “pantry” and “larder.”
To me pantry is any closet/cupboard that you store groceries in- canned goods, boxed stuff, etc. “Larder” has the extra connotation of being able to store fresh things like milk, butter, eggs… and that it somehow is cooler (temperature-wise, not style-wise, although I suppose a larder COULD be quite stylish…) than a pantry.
Clearly a joke. Like saying in the US, “that’s not a fourth bedroom, it’s a closet.”
I knew someone who lived in an efficiency apartment with a Murphy bed; the bed was removed. She put her twin bed in the closet and slept there! It was just big enough for the bed and a nightstand. I don’t know what she did with her clothes. The apartment itself was good sized; the LR and kitchen was, I mean. No bedroom apart from the closet.
My airing cupboard is about 5’ x 5’ btw.