Here's the new thread, all shiny and new.

Tracy, since I'm only temporarily in the midwest, I will overlook that last comment.

Hey, are you getting any work done today?

No I'm not doing any work. Bored to tears. I'm on a conference call that is trying to put me to sleep.

I'm just sitting in my office trying to recruit doctors to do influenza surveillance for me. For some reason no one wants to do it. (Possibly because it's dull and annoying?)

What's the conference call about?

Upgrading our computer systems. I'm on the task force to do all the testing and set up all the new systems and procedures.

That does sound particularly sleep-inducing. Here's something to keep you entertained:

[silfreed.net]

N.

Ha. I'd like to do that to a few people I work with.

Thank heavens the thing is over!!!

Tracy, congratulations on making it through that call relatively intact. I have something even funnier, but I'd have to email it to you.

email away. tracyans@optonline.net or tracy_sienkiewicz@hyperion.com

I just sent you one as well, Tracy :-)

Just thought of another difference too incidentally.... in Great Britain we have villages and towns as well as cities. In America from what I can make out they only have cities - who for example has ever been prompted by a piece of software to enter "town or city" in the Location field? It's always "city". Similarly virtually everyone I know has a street address in the thousands. No matter if you live in a shack amongst the Redwoods in California with just a couple of other shacks, a church and a general store (Trans. "shop") for company - you can guarantee it'll be called something like "Split Pine City" and his shack at the end of the street, which'd be No. 3 Main Street anywhere else in the world, would be "Suite#5, 1003c Main Street" or something. What's that all about then? Anyone know?

Tracy, did you get it? I sent it to the optonline address. Also, did it work?

Ptolemy, some of the suburbs here are called villages, and we do refer to smaller centers as towns. I guess it just doesn't make it onto the forms.

Re. the house numbers: most cities I've lived in here are arranged in a grid where each block has a number and the block numbers go up in 100's. So, even if there are only 3 or 4 houses on the block, when you get to the next block it goes up by 100. This makes it easier to find things in the city. (Although not easier to understand my explanation. I'm afraid I've made rather a mess of it.)

Nicky & Ptolemy - I got both of your emails and they worked great! Thanks so much.

Re: towns vs cities. I actually live in the Town of Stratford. City and town are usually designated by population.

Re: house numbers. In the town where I am most house numbers are spread far apart so that when someone squeezes another house inbetween two already there, they have a number for it. Even numbers on the right, odd on the left.

Most main streets will go up into the thousands because they keep adding houses.

Now that I've probably given you way more information than you needed, I'll stop.

British roads tend to have evolved over a longer period than many American streets, and certainly in a less organised fashion. A long road in part of a city may be know by three or four names at different parts along its length. The Sheffield road that runs from Brook Hill roundabout, up past the parks, through Commonside and to the top of Walkley, is known as Bolsover St, Winter St. (both within less than 1/2 mile !), Crookes Valley Road, Barber Rd, Commonside (just over 1/2 mile), Howard Rd and finally, South Street. That's 7 name changes in less than 2 miles !

oh we do that name change to the same road here quite a bit too...

what always gets me though is that the road can have a 90 degree turn as well as keep going straight ahead and the part that made the turn gets the same name but the one going straight ahead gets a new one. Makes absolutely NO sense to me!

And street numbers here really are easy to figure when you look at it from this angle. Most cities or towns (named dependant upon size and population and whether it is officially incorporated or not) have a "main street" from which all streets are numbered. The houses closest to the center have the smallest numbers. However, as you move from block to block, the numbers will go up by 100. So on the first block, you'll have 1 Main Street, 2 Main Street, (although some places start at 100 Main Street..just depends upon how new they are) On the next block, it'll go 100 Main Street, then the block after that it becomes 200 Main Street.

This makes it MUCH easier for emergency services to find you if you have problems or you've been beating your wife and you need to be arrested.

Washington DC has a slightly different way of numbering...everything is done in Quadrants... North East, North West, South East, South West... and they're all numbered outward from the US Capitol building. So you may have 2 houses with the address of 1234 Massachussets Avenue, but they'd be diffentiated by a NW or SE in the address, letting you know which quadrant they were in. Confusing, eh? LOL

Re emergency services - Warwickshire Fire Service publish a county roadmap. It appears to be hand drawn and is pretty useless for finding your way around, but does show every thatched roof and village pond in Warwickshire.

At least one village (which I've briefly visited, about eighteen years ago, but whose exact identity I don't now recall...) in this county of West Sussex has a rather different (and hopefully unique...) system of house numbers.
Back at the date when that concept was introduced (for postal reasons, I think?) all of the existing properties within that entire village belonged to the local 'Lord of the Manor', and apparently whatever rules then applied consequently gave him the right to allocate the numbers. The idea of giving the cottages involved (which were mostly within, and now comprise most of, the modern settlement's centre) addresses in particular streets, and then numbering those in each road sequentially, either simply didn't occur to him or (if anybody else suggested it) didn't suit his tastes...
He chose to use just one single sequence of house-numbers for the entire village, instead, and rather than assign these on a geographical basis (east to west, north to south, or whatever) he used his contemporary rent-roll as the basis of the system... I don't know whether that list was arranged according to the starting dates of the tenants' leases, or alphabetically according to their surnames, but whichever was the case it meant that the sequence of numbers jumped (and, since as far as I know the system has never been "reformed"...) still jumps from place to place across the village.

Pity the poor (non-"local") postman who's assigned that village as (part or all of) his route!

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Sarah _
More Sussex dialect: An alleyway that exists as a route between two roads is still called a "twitten", at least in the Worthing area.

Dante _
Re people calling themselves "English" rather than "British": This seems to have become more popular in recent years, at least hereabouts.
I think, and a number of other people with whom I've spoken agree, that it's largely a reaction to Scotland getting its own Parliament (again) & more of a perceived separate identity, and Wales getting its own Assembly & more of a perceived separate identity, but England being given only the choice between continuing to have all of its affairs dealt with by the UK's main Parliament (with the MPs for Scottish and Welsh seats continuing to have votes in this even when it's discussing purely "English" matters in fields which those new legislatures would handle for their own provinces) or of being divided into a number of "regions" _ which would apparently be as politically separate from each other as from Scotland or Wales _ that mostly (with the exceptions of Yorkshire and the North-East, where public support for the proposal _limited though it has apparently been, even there _ may be strongest) lack historical identities... Oh, and a government minister (Robin Cook? One of the Scots who was in the Cabinet at some point, anyway, I think...) daring to claim that "England doesn't exist"!

More transatlantic differences _

'Public School' (UK) = 'Private School' (USA)
'Private School' (USA) = 'Independent School' (UK).

'Off-Licence' (UK; so-called because its owner has a licence to sell beers, wines & spirits for consumption off of the premises) = 'Liquor Store' (USA)

'Bar' (USA) = 'Public House' or 'Pub' (UK)... Over here a 'Bar' is usually (although the American usage may also occur in a few cases today) either just the counter within a pub (or other example of "licenced premises") at which drinks are sold or any one of the several rooms (fitted with such counters) into which a single pub may be subdivided: The traditional arrangement until recent decades (although it's largely vanished by now...), at least in the south of England, was into a 'Public Bar' and a 'Saloon Bar': The latter would probably have been smaller than the 'Public' one, would have had better furnishings but slightly higher prices charged for the same drinks, and would originally (say until the 1940s) have been reserved for the socially "better" classes of customer...

'Parish', if not being used in the religious sense (which is, I think, the same on both sides of the pond) _ In the UK a 'Civil Parish' is a subdivision of any 'District' that hasn't been constitued a 'Borough' (an incorporated town or city) in its entirety, and a 'District' (whether it comprises one single Borough or is divided into a number of separate Parishes) is a subdivision of a 'County'. In the USA the equivalent of a 'District' seems to be (at least in some of the older states, such as Massachussets) a 'Township', and the equivalent of a 'Civil Parish' might be an (incoporated?) 'Village'... but in the state of Louisiana the term 'Parish' is used instead of 'County'.

And here's a difference of definitions that applies within England _ In (at least some) parts of the north "Brass" is a slang term for money, but in London it seems (according to various Crime novels that I've read, anyway, although maybe not amongst the people with whom I mixed back when I still lived there...) to be one of the slang terms meaning 'prostitute' (perhaps as rhyming slang, from 'brass part' for the alternative slang expression 'tart'?) instead.

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Post Edited (07-29-03 17:30)

Ooh, politically separate "regions"! I hadn't heard about this! Where do I sign?



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"Whisky-wa-wa," I breathed - she was dressed as Biffo the Bear.