Smylers wrote:
It only does that if you've heard the term before. I hadn't heard of it
before this thread, and I'm a native English speaker. My initial guess
was that it's some kind of small cart, but I now gather it's an
alternative term for a pushchair, or perhaps for a pram.
Either way Google suggests "babycart" isn't that commonly used -- number
of hits listed for each of these phrases:
babycart 18_100
"baby cart" 75_500
pushchair 739_000
pram 4_440_000
And picking a less-commonly used term doesn't seem a great idea.
I haven't heard "baby cart" much either... I would probably say "baby
carriage" (I'm from the USA). A Google search for "baby carriage" (in
quotes) gets 918_000 results. There's a popular children's rhyme that
kids used to tease each other when I was young:
John and Susie sitting in a tree,
K-I-S-S-I-N-G.
First comes love, then comes marriage,
Then comes a baby in a baby carriage!
Replace "John" and "Susie" with the names of the people you're teasing,
of course. :-) I don't know if there's a British equivalent of the
rhyme. Anyway, Wikipedia claims that a baby carriage and a pram are
equivalent:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_carriage
With half the number of syllabes, babycart is much faster to say
"babycart" is 3 syllables; "shopping trolley" is only 4 -- and again
Google agress with me that in English "shopping trolley" is a more usual
phrase than "supermarket trolley":
"supermarket trolley" 72_800
"shopping trolley" 1_330_000
In the USA (at least where I'm from), it's called a "shopping cart",
which is also 3 syllables, and gets 766_000_000 results. Maybe that's
our winner? Then again, I don't know if "shopping cart" sounds strange
to non-American speakers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopping_cart
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Michael W Thelen
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