Any other southerners burning?

I almost built a fire Wednesday and Thursday nights; it got chilly. I did add a blanket to the bed.

 

Yeah well it was in the mid- 80's today and is supposed to be 90F and 91F on the next two days. No blankets left, even the skivvies are getting the evil eye too!

OFFTOPIC: And we are off to a bowling pin shoot tomorrow..... shot from an uncovered firing point. Left on the hardware bench, in the sun, the black pistols get so hot they cannot be picked up, literally. Have to throw a towel or pistol rug over them to be able to handle them when called to the line.

Brian

 

I know what you mean, it is getting that time of year that even a shinny spanner left out in the sun will get too hot to handle.

 

I live in upstate SC, deffinitly from the south. Born and raised here in SC and never lived anywhere else.

That said i uavent burned anything but a trash pile in months!

 

Nah. Thats alright.

 

Cripes! No wonder why we kicked them out of here!!!

 

Spanner...spanner...isn't that what you drive across when you are going down the road and come to a river?

 

Being on the fire department my first thought was a "spanner" what you tighten the hose connections with. But she uses a lot of brit terms so I am just assuming that she means wrench. Like an open end or box end. They call them spanners over there...I think.

 

We call a wrench a spanner down here to!

I have been burning my stove now for a couple of months. I think I'm further south than you guys were referring to!



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I was thinking yall did down there as well but was not sure ao i left it out. I actually had typed it out but deleted it.

 

We (Americans) have and use 'spanners' also but they are not wrenches per se, they are force applying tools used to twist nuts (Easy Boys!) but they are not of the 'open end', 'box' or 'flare fitting wrench' or similar. There are two common types, one reaches around a round nut with slots in it, grabs onto one of the slots and is then used to tighten or loosen the nut exactly like a wrench. The other type is a pin spanner, basically a flat piece of steel shaped sort of like a tuning- fork, with two pins protruding (Boys!) from the face. Again the nuts that take this type of spanner have holes drilled around the edge parallel with the nuts' axis. Hook type spanners are commonly used on things such as hydraulic sleeves or gland nuts (which is kinda' like saying 'nut' twice I think), while pin spanners are used when it is difficult or impossible to get to the actual OD of the nut.

Another case of English / English / English translations. I had a great Brit. friend and we spent a lot of time teaching each other 'the language' and so I am a fair translator, including some rather [non self- explanatory] sayings such as "Spit the Dummy", which after translation, context placement and the application of some logic, makes perfect sense. A "Dummy" in the UK is a baby pacifier. To "Spit the Dummy" means one who is having some type of emotional event and refuses to be pacified (or 'dummied' I guess).

Tomorrow's lessons will include 'Take it apart' and 'electric space heater' translated into British English.

ROFLMAO in my flat, is what a Brit. would probably say here.

I do not think those in Oz (Australia) have, use, need or want wrenches or spanners of any kind. It has always been my understanding they just use two hands and twist whatever needs twisting. Dem be some tough boys and girls down dare.

Brian

 

Like what I said. First thing that came to mind is the things we use to take fire hoses apart or tighten them so they don't leak. Usually there just hand tight though.

 

Are we done with language lessons? A spanner in the UK is what we call a wrench in the US. Simple huh? Get over it. We do not speak english in the US no matter what your mother told you. We speak American. I am fairly fluent in American and Canadian, being born in Canada, but I was a MOD on a US/UK/South Africa/Australia forum for a while and became fairly good at translating. Yes, I said translating. It was intentional to jar you out of thinking you speak the same language. You do not, although the language you speak shares many things with that other language. Outside of the US, folks seem to be much more particular about using proper grammar and spelling, although they do spell some things differently than we do here. There are a good many things that are not at all common place in the US vocabulary that a person in the UK would readily understand like "the mains" on his power system. People in the US, mostly, would have no idea what that might mean. I am pretty sure an Aussie would know what it means and a SA person, Canadian or US resident would not. The list goes on and on but we all assume we speak the same language. It is not just Americans that are ignorant of the differences. People from all over the world who think they speak the same language are often surprised to find out they do not. When I was in France, I was asked by a french woman what I thought of when I heard a particular word and I had not a clue what to tell her. She had studied "english" as a foreign language and explained to me the meaning she knew for that word. I am somewhat fluent in french so I also listened to how she explained it in french but to no avail. It may have been some kind of obscure English idiom but no way could I relate to it in either American or Canadian. It was nothing I had run into in my multicultural forum MOD experience so it was a total mystery to me. I am certain that she had discovered it was not a good choice of words dealing with English or American speakers but she brought it up to illustrate the hazards of thinking you are speaking the same language. People think that Mexicans speak Spanish but equally they do not. They have the same issues understanding each other as we english, american, canadian, aussie, indian, south africans have. We have a common root language but our languages have diverged over the last hundred years since we quit living together.

 

Well, given the length of your 'language lesson' post, it would seem that 'we' and by that I mean 'you' are not done giving lessons.

One less you seem to have given us is a rather low- key version of the English phrase 'Spit the Dummy'.

There are enough deviations / oddities in American coloquial English to be more than interesting. Like this: what is the past tense of the word 'hang'. As in, say, hanging a picture on the wall but in past tense..... "Yesterday, I XXXX that picture on the wall". ?

Brian (might as well chat about language, we are in the period between burning wood and getting the stove ready for the heating season....)

 

Thats an easy one. Here in america we would say "hanged" . "I hanged the picture".

At least some regions and social circles might??!!

 

This one is odd in English- past tense of hang is 'hanged' if the object is animate, and 'hung' if inanimate. So a picture would be hung while a person would be hanged (even if it was a large man.... ). Which brings us to the legal expression used in sentencing: "Hanged by the neck until dead.". Now this is interesting because it implies choices and the two obvious ones are 1) what else would you hang a person by to punish him and 2) at what point, other than death, would you stop.... when he is gasping and really swinging a lot from the rope (rather than dangling quietly)?

The cornerstone I always try to use is to find a site or booklet that is along the lines of 'Common errors in English' and then just do not do whatever is in there. Eliminate all the wrong ways and the right way must be the one(s) left, right? Or is that correct?

Hmmmm, where is my little book.....

I have a German friend who asked me what the English word was for 'burning at the stake' or 'being burned at the stake'. I thought about that and to the best of my knowledge, the IS NO single word for that. In English, we just call being burned at the stake.... well, burned at the stake. He found this odd so I added the idea that since we do not do it very often, we could really not increase the efficiency of the language by inventing a word for that process.....

As the story goes: One morning, a Human Resourses director started to fill out a Government survey. One of the very first questions was 'How many employees does your company have broken down by sex?' To which he responded: 'Alcohol is more of a problem for us.'.

Brian (yep, not much burnin' going on here, hence the extra free time normally used to tend the stove....)