As someone who has an interest in interior design/decor I like looking at furniture updating on various sites but I get annoyed by the fact that many people want to use the names that are used in the US for various items. I have thought of publishing a glossary & asking people to stick to the terms that are used in Australian English. Here are a few examples.

Bedside tables not night stands - tables that are put beside beds.

Dressers are a particular item of furniture & the accurate term is used for pieces that have a cupboard & sometimes drawers at the bottom & open shelves at the top. They are usually used in the kitchen or dining area to store crockery & table linen.

They are not synonymous with chests of drawers or dressing tables or tallboys. These are different things entirely.

Unfortunately for the next term I think we have already lost this battle but I’m prepared to fight a rear guard action. BATHROOM. This is a room with a bath used for bathing. It is NOT a toilet or a lavatory or a dunny or even a WC. ( I know that our UK English speakers would argue that a room for ablutions but with just a shower is a shower room not a bathroom. I can accept that.)

Let’s not get bogged down in the American predilection for euphemisms & inaccuracies.  Fight against American linguistic imperialism.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

 When I decided to write about things that I consider important & believe should be discussed I wanted especially to go along the education line. So here’s my second concern - HOME SCHOOLING. This seems to have become a popular thing but I wonder how good it is for students as well as for standards in education. I have had some experience in this area in that late in my career (yes, I was a secondary English teacher) I taught at a school where the students had not been in a formal classroom setting until the first year of secondary school & while they were, almost without exception, competent readers, they had little idea about the conventions of writing. So I had to spend most of their first term teaching them about sentences & paragraphs among other things. Now I know some people will say that such things no longer matter; after all we now have texts & emails & zoom. But is this true? Will we end up as a society where we have no developed form of writing? The ...
Read more
 I realise that I’ve been a bit remiss in not keeping up with my rant. My excuse is that there are so many things to feel strongly about. I’ve been thinking for some time about proportionality in war & it’s something I’ve wanted to write something about, especially as the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima & Nagasaki approaches. I know that those terrible events are justified (if that’s possible) as being instrumental in bringing about a more timely end to WW2 but eyewitness accounts & the ongoing trauma suffered by the inhabitants of those cities are reasons for thought. I also include events like the bombing of Dresden. There are, of course, many examples from history both ancient and more recent. What concerns me at the moment, and this where the idea of proportionality comes in, is the situation in the Middle East. I think any right minded person will & indeed should condemn the actions against Israeli citizens on 7th October 2023 and agree that the Jewish ...
Read more

Education continued

 Of course education does not mean just sitting in a classroom. It encompasses all sorts of learning and travel and holidays are without doubt part of this wider experience BUT the question of children being taken out of school particularly at the beginning of term(s) in order to go skiing or to foreign destinations requires deeper thought. I realise that some people will immediately disagree - my children, my decision. There’s also the problem of higher costs during school holidays. But then travel agents, hotels, airlines etc have to make money while they can. The difficulty arises especially at the start of the school year. Children who are not at school during the first couple of weeks miss out on a number of things eg perhaps a choice of where they sit and with whom; introduction to new concepts. Sometimes or even often these things are difficult for teachers to deal with and children feel left out or just baffled/confused by ideas they don’t recognise. There’s been much discu...
Read more