> There's a mini thesis here regarding previous subjects of American / > English: > > Elevator - lift
Part of a shoe for making French presidents and American couch-jumpers look taller. > Cheese - is it orange? > Sausage - Spicy like pepperoni or genuine English pork banger? > Muffin - or scone, or biscuit? > Earl Grey Grande - Bit of latin influence here surely. Earl and grey are of Germanic origin. Grand is an interesting word - the more commonly used word for big in classical Latin is magnus, as in magnificent, magnitude, Magnum Photos and so on. The Romance languages developed from vulgar Latin, which preferred more concrete terms for things, words with a bit of colour and punch and magnus seems to have been a bit too abstract, so grandis was much more common at the level of ordinary people. Yet somehow the Romance languages retained the comparative and superlative of magnus - maior & maximus, rather than those of grandis - grandior and grandissimus. Highly recommended read for anyone who's interested in such things: <http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521734189> > Couch - sofa. Qv. Preferred means of expression for loved-up munchkins > Scotch - Pretty universal, but we'd be more likely to say > "whisky" (without the "e" of course). In standard British English we never pronounce the e in whisky. > And, if it's single > malt, definitely no ice - perhaps just a splash of water. > -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
