British-English to American-English 'translation' thread

[AwayinaChive]

[Turtle'sMammy]

UK - Coriander = leaves and seeds
US - coriander = seeds
cilantro = leaves

[BLTMama]

Oh, thought of another: UK allotment = no real equivalent in the US; a private section in a community garden. Here community gardens are pretty rare and almost always co-operatively maintained.

I'm still a little confused about corn flour/cornmeal. I think UK corn flour = US cornstarch (a white powder used to thicken things), but I'm not sure what you all call cornmeal (ground corn for baking with, the same thing as polenta)? We don't really use the term corn flour at all.

And since I flipped my lid about it the other day , I should probably point out that US canola oil = UK rapeseed oil.

Re: yams and sweet potatoes, people tend to use them interchangeably here. Some people use yam for the orange ones and sweet potatoes for the yellow ones (or the other way around). But really they're both sweet potatoes and yams are a completely different thing that only gets used in Caribbean/Hispanic food.

Jell-O is generally dessert, although some pretty terrible atrocities used to get committed in its name -- stuff with peas and carrots and meat and whatnot. No one would call it jelly here, though -- if you don't call it Jell-O, it's gelatin. Cranberry sauce is NOT Jello, but some kind of Jello dessert is pretty common at Thanksgiving (we have one with pretzels and cream cheese and whipped cream )

Queue is getting much more common here as they use in online and telephone customer service a lot. But I think people are scared of using it because they don't know how to spell it!

We have self-rising flour, but it's just not used very commonly. We also have bread flour, and pastry flour, and cake flour, and 00 pasta flour imported from Italy, and whole wheat and rye and soy and amaranth and teff flour every other crazy thing you can think of. The US is a consumer paradise. Or something.

Finally, I would also like to defend American cheese -- there is very good cheese here; there's just way more horrible rubbery dreck, too. Tillamook from Oregon has very good "premium" cheese (although their regular stuff is pretty crap anymore), Maytag Blue from Iowa (holla KG!) wins international prizes, and OAG is right that New York sharp cheddar is DA BOMB (FIL is from Cuba NY, the home of New York cheddar).

And finally finally, I mention this in every UK/US terms thread we have, but my favorite British term is wheelie bin. I don't know why but it just makes me smile every time I see it.

[OnlyAGinger]

please, do share...wheelie bin?? garbage can?

[twilightfan]

[OnlyAGinger]

bloody brilliant!

[blackberrycrimble]

[fourweewonders]

Vaugly related to bins, do they have skips in america i've never heard mention of them on american tv and they're not quite the same as dumpsters

[OnlyAGinger]

nope, skips don't exist as a noun...

[AwayinaChive]

[Wilma]

UK pizza = US pie
Not everywhere but definitely in Boston, I always thought that was quite strange as it doesn't have a lid!

[Antje]

So...what about the rest of us commonwealthers? I'm Canadian, and I'll bet the Aussies and Kiwis (do we have any Kiwis?) and others have their own words too!

I've scanned this thread, and so far I use about 60% of the "US" words and 40% of the "UK" words. In the case of things like "courgette", even though I would say zucchini, as a Canadian I'm familiar enough with French to understand what a courgette is.

[AwayinaChive]

[BLTMama]

[Wilma]