So there’s this advert on telly at the moment trying to persuade me to go to the States. It’s kinda catchy - “Lemon trees, Lemon trees!” Oh yes, I can see me falling for that.
I used to love that song about how much the guy liked bread - you know “It’s this loaf, it’s this loaf, it’s this loaf, it’s this loaf that I’m feeling”. And that one about Sue Lawley. She was nice.
My favourite was the one where the guy marks the woman as his prey “Tonight I sellotape my glove to you!”
It does appear to want you to go to all of them. I think it might be like some kind of treasure hunt. Ya know - you go all over the States picking up clues, and eventually you will find your lemon trees.
That’s interesting. I didn’t know that. I wonder why the term dropped out of use? It’s such a common expression here. I would honestly think that there’s barely a day goes past, if there ever is one, that we don’t use it.
Only in literature or film conveying British parlance. At our most natural, we Merkins are most likely to say “two weeks” or “a two-week period”. It’s not a discrete unit of measurement for us as it is for you, obviously. I must say it term “fortnight” always leaves me bemused; why two weeks?
We kind of don’t think of it as “two weeks”. You got it right the first time: it’s a discrete unit of measurement in and of itself. We’re more likely to think of it as “14 days” (which is basically what it means - well, fourteen nights at any rate) than “two weeks”.
And furthermore, you’re far more likely in the States to hear the words “a two-week period” than “a fourteen-day period”. Maybe it’s because the former is closely associated with pay schedules, but the latter is just a number having no particular significance other than being a happenstance of time.
Now here’s a Stateside word: rile. I thought it was a generally known colloquialism throughout the English-speaking sphere, but I had to translate it for someone from Tamil Nadu (and as is not unusual for an Indian his command of English and its vocabulary was better than most Yanks). Turns out “rile” is actually US/Canadian, and it turns out that not even all Yanks or Canadians may know it, because it’s apparently midland speech. This disturbs my world view.
