What interesting creatures live in your garden?

[Pulsegleaner]

Well, that sort of always happens. Since a lot of my favorite authors are British I have gotten used to sometimes having to go and look things up because they are using expressions we just don't have here. It took me until my teens to realized "kitted out" meant "equipped" that "pudding" meant all desserts, not just the gooey stuff you eat in bowls and why your gym teacher making you do gym in your pants would be so humiliating (because of couse here in America, "pants" means trousers, not underwear.) It doesn't help much that years of watching BBC via PBS means a lot of the British speak I learned is dated even for Britain ("bally" for example)

Not that it doesn't happen the other way. A few months ago I was talking with someone in Holland and he came back and asked what the hell the term "on the fritz" meant. I was so used to using it (note to anyone who also has never heard of it, it means "broken" or "malfunctioning") that it never occurred to me that it wasn't universal. I have no idea where the phrase comes from (actually according to the web, NO one does).

Sumi isn't Afrikaans the one where the equivalent to "raining cats and dogs" is something like "raining old women with big walking sticks?"

 

[sumi]

We also say "it's raining cats and dogs". Dit reën katte en honde. And it did, this afternoon!

I think a lot of our idioms and sayings come from Holland, like our language, which is an adaption of Dutch and very similar, though Afrikaans is more guttural.

 

[Smart Red]

Learning, learning, learning. I love this site.

 

[goatgurl]

me too Smart Red. every time i come here i learn something different. while I'm here on this thread I'm going to add another strange thing i saw in my garden the other day. one spider eating another spider and he got kind of upset when he thought i was going to take it from him.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

That's a really pretty jumping spider (don't think I've ever seen one before that was black and white with metallic green mandibles)

 

[goatgurl]

isn't he neat looking. i kind of felt bad for the little wolf spider tho

 

[thistlebloom]

That's an incredible picture @goatgurl. What kind of camera do you use? It's a very sharp and clear image.

 

[britesea]

I love wikipedia and used it loads in the past when researching for articles, etc.

The spelling of stuff is a jammy one for me though, since my English husband explained that the English have a way of spelling certain words and the Americans have another... And me being neither borrow from each and often end up arguing with the spell checker, which I lost faith in forever the other day when it tried to convince me there was no such word as "hope"

Idioms are wonderful and have a wealth of them in my mother tongue, Afrikaans, which I often translate into english, much to the amusement of one of my BYC friends. That came back to bite me in the backside once or twice...

Ah yes... England and America. Two countries separated by a common language.

 

[goatgurl]

@thistlebloom the camera i use the most is just a canon power shot sx160is. not very expensive as cameras go. in fact i have more expensive cameras (i love picture taking) but this little canon does a great job. 16 mega pixels with a 16x zoom. it fits in my pocket or purse easily and i take it with me most of the time

 

[sumi]