Awright?
Swinging out to London this evening. My Ambien is packed. I’m wearing a fuzzy jumper and practising bleary scowls for Heathrow (sorry, HeathROW). The British Airways trolley dollies are among my favourites, for masochistic reasons, and I can’t wait to be woken up at five for chilled, stale baked goods, as I will no longer be able to call them. (Why don’t Americans extend this usage to “boiled goods” and “fried goods”?)
Wednesday, November 26th 2003 at 4:23 pm
Because boiled and fried are not good.
Sorry.
Thursday, November 27th 2003 at 9:08 am
Nice one.
But bagels could be “boiled goods”. Freedom fries could be “fried goods”.
It would match the formal usages that Americans sometimes go for—“apparel” instead of “clothes”, “produce” (pronounced strangely) instead of “fruit and vegetables”. When I moved to New York these oddities were the hardest to learn.
Saturday, November 29th 2003 at 12:50 pm
I’m not sure what the rest of the country’s excuse is, but in New York City I suspect we use the word produce because we’re not quite sure where fruits and vegetables come from. I mean, they can’t really grow on trees and out of the dirt, like all the picture books say they do, right? Somebody had to produce them somewhere, in a factory. Like, let’s be realistic here for a minute . . .