Monthly Archives: July 2006

Free Lunch

July 31, 2006 – 7:07 am

I watched a drama a couple of days ago that featured a young woman on her lunch break from her burger-chain job, talking to her boyfriend. Him: Where are you? Her: Having my free lunch at Betty’s Burger Bar, which just goes to show that there is no such thing.

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Double Negatives

July 27, 2006 – 10:47 am

There is a craze at work for using the word ‘irregardless’, which is assumed to mean “without regard to” but actually means (if it means anything) “without without regard to”, hence “respectful of”. I like this putdown from The American Heritage Dictionary: The Third Edition of The American Heritage Dictionary states firmly that “the label [...]

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Up or Down

July 26, 2006 – 8:12 am

One of the things you find when moving country is that people ask you what like/dislike about your new country. When we moved to the US we didn’t have a big plan, we just stumbled into it. We didn’t have in mind to become rich on the fat of the US (figuratively or literally), and [...]

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Small Things

July 25, 2006 – 9:21 am

I’m currently working through all the little things that, perhaps surprisingly, bring me up short now that I’m in England. For example, my uncle is a keen gardener who collects rainwater in a variety of containers to help keep his garden green. Every time I see one of these containers, with no lid, just sitting [...]

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Ooh

July 24, 2006 – 6:31 am

One of the things I’m finding confusing about the move back to England is the sheer quantity of Englishness over here. For the last 7 years I’ve been used to hearing Americans, so any English accent or reference to an English place was enough to raise a small ‘ooh’. I’m still having that same reaction [...]

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