A hurricane was approaching the Houston area and I was working at a large electronics retailer speaking with the store manager when a woman approached us and in what I assume was an English accent asked if we had any torches.
I said sure right over here.
When I got back the manager looked at me as if I was from Mars. He wanted to know how I knew what a torch was and I said read, listen and learn.
It’s a good thing she got her torches because much of the city was without power for three weeks or more.
Was not a fan of the show myself, so I don’t know the exact region. These were folks who definitely didn’t live in the city of New Orleans though…they were in a very rural area, near swamps. I checked the show info and they are described as descendants of French Canadian refugees from the 1800s, so that’s what made me think of this show.
(This means that if you see a British English speaker and an American English speaker each standing beside their cars, and you say to each of them “Excuse me, do you have a torch in your boot?”, one of them is certain to glance at his legs and then give you a very strange look.)
Harters
(John Hartley - a culinary patriot eating & cooking in Northwest England)
52
I don’t have a mobile phone (note different name) so don’t know how common a torch feature is but my companion in life’s phone does have one. My guess is that they will be pretty standard.
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Harters
(John Hartley - a culinary patriot eating & cooking in Northwest England)
53
Even better if you ask “Excuse me, do you have a torch in your boot. I need to look under my car’s bonnet”.
My phone once switched to UK English even though I hadn’t explicitly asked for that (I probably tried to set something to “Canadian” just to see what I’d get, and the poor thing did its best), and it presented me with a “Torch” instead of a “Flashlight” - a couple of other things were different as well. I think that at that time the Samsung translation team had UK and US both settled fairly well, but hadn’t yet finished the little details for Canada (and presumably Australia and others - the places where neither OED nor Webster’s tell the whole story).
I think for most Canadians “color” is less jarring than “torch” - it certainly is for me - so I switched back to US English.
I’m imagining my mother being in charge of labelling Google Maps - her rural Canadian, mixed with the little bit of very old-fashioned English slang she got from her father, might confuse a few people.
[non-English-speaking accent] “Excuse me, please, what is Biffy?”
check it out. It’s a pretty cool exploration of the variety of dialects, and the differences in word usage across the U.S. Originally aired on PBS in 1988.
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Harters
(John Hartley - a culinary patriot eating & cooking in Northwest England)
56
I used to play on another, non-food, forum which had a number of Canadian contributors. Prior to my first visit, I asked for advice so as not to let my experience of visiting the States cause me a social gaffe.
I recall the summary of advice was:
the national game is not baseball, but ice hockey
ask for directions to the washroom , not the restroom and certainly not the bathroom
and the final letter of the alphabet is pronounced “zed”, as in the UK
Canadians generally know what a restroom and a bathroom are, though restroom sounds American. Bathroom is heard more in some areas than others.
But Canadians don’t play ice hockey - “ice hockey” in Canada sounds like “banger sausages and mashed potatoes” would sound in England. In Canada, all types except normal hockey on ice need special names to distinguish them.
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