A couple of words that struck me while rummaging through my new Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate (see this post):
1) trough ‘a long shallow often V-shaped receptacle for the drinking water or feed of domestic animals’: pronunciations ˈtrȯf, ˈtrȯth, by bakers often ˈtrō. It never would have occurred to me that it was anything but the first (/trɔf/); has anybody heard the others?
2) jerrican ‘a narrow flat-sided container for liquids usually holding about five U.S. gallons (about 19 liters)’: etymology Jerry + can; from its German design. Who knew?
And a very happy new year to all those who follow the Gregorian calendar!
CEPD notes that “some bakers pronounce /traʊ/”. That seems to be a different diphthong, unless it’s a misprint for /trəʊ/.
Huh. The plot thickens!
The toth coths as he ploths the doth.
…and here I was rhyming trough with cough. I don’t think I ever got an opportunity to pronounce it, though (or use it in poetry, heh).
And the plural troughs may voice the /f/ to /v/ or the /θ/ to /ð/. Thus a single lexeme adds three otherwise unknown pronunciations to English’s most notorious tetragraph.
I have heard of a “jerry can” but would not have recognised “jerrican”, which looks like a cousin of “pemmican”. Dictionaries vary as to which spelling to prefer out of “jerry can” “jerrycan” “jerrican”
So bakers often rhyme it with “dough”? (Presumably they’re referring to some vessel/container used in bakeries that does not usually hold feed or water for livestock although it has a similar shape?)
I don’t recall having ever heard the word “trough” pronounced, but I think I would have guessed “trow”, rhyming with “cow”. I’m not sure what that would be in diphthong terms.
@DM: To be clear, the standard pronunciation Hat quoted does rhyme with cough. But apparently Americans without the cot-caught merger pronounce both with the THOUGHT vowel (unlike BrE speakers). I have the merger so I was blissfully unaware of this.
Bareka nɛ ya yʋʋmpaalig, yanam Zupibigdim la wʋsa!
(A Blwyddyn Newydd Dda i chi.)
@F: I think it might be more illuminating to say that we pronounce both with the CLOTH vowel. Which is admittedly the same as the THOUGHT vowel in our dialect. But putting both “trough” and “cough” in the CLOTH set rather than the THOUGHT set explains why Brits pronounce them the way they do (i.e., with their rather different CLOTH vowel).
It’s still A.D. 2025 where I am, but due to the vagaries of longitude the odometer switched over from Reiwa 7 to Reiwa 8 in Japan back when I was having lunch earlier. So 明けましておめでとう to all.
…correction, then: replace cough with rough.
@mollymooly “Thus a single lexeme adds three otherwise unknown pronunciations to English’s most notorious tetragraph.”
That’s nothing next to the 144 pronunciations that Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged (1961 and later imprints) shows for the nine-letter English lexeme a fortiori.
That number should be 132, not 144 pronunciations for a fortiori.
@J.W.B.: I’ve seen the phrase “kneading trough”, but the Wikiparticle is called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_trough
Happy 2026 to all who celebrate!
Of course, if you are old school and follow the Seleucid era, it’s the year 2337.
and follow the Seleucid era
AUC was good enough for my atavus, so it’s good enough for me. It’ll be 2779 come the next Ides of March.
Naming the year properly (i.e. by the names of the consuls) has become difficult of late, due to ongoing disruption to normal politics. I blame the Gracchi. Bloody extreme radical socialists.
That should be, “follow the Seleucid epoch.”
In Israel the “Jerry can” etymology is quite well-known.
Happy New Year!
@JWB: thanks for the correction. I totally forgot about the CLOTH set because neither my native California accent nor my mental model RP-ish speaker makes the distinction.
Feliz año nuevo!
The plot thickens!
MW3NID has
\’trȯ|f sometimes ‘trä|, chiefly by bakers ‘trō, chiefly by Brit bakers ‘traů, dial |th or |\ft\ n, pl troughs \|fs, |vz, |ths, |thz\
(here ȯ=THOUGHT ä=LOT ō=GOAT aů=MOUTH th=θ th=ð)
It also has headwords for variant spellings “troch”, “troft”, “5 trow”; and derived terms “troffer” [inverted trough], “trogue” [mining trough], “4 trow” [canoe]
corrections:* “trock” should be “troch” and thz and th=ð have th underlined.
notes: there now appear to be 8 trough-unique pronunciations of ough, that is 2 ou × 4 gh, to wit THOUGHT/LOT × θ/ð/v/ft
*Second round of corrections. For the first round, I tried editing my comment but it screwed up the non-ASCII so I deleted it and re-added with corrections. Not doing that again.
“trock” should be “troch” and thz and th=ð have th underlined.
I fixed the former but didn’t attempt the latter. What a remarkable variety of pronunciations!
It only pretends to do that. Refresh the page, and all the non-ASCII suddenly looks as intended.
Ordinary users cannot use the
[u]tag to underline, but I think the blog administrator can (just like he can use[small]and other tags that we poor peons cannot).But there is a workaround for the ordinary commentator, albeit convoluted:
<abbr title="">underlined</abbr>textshows up as
underlined text
(If you leave out the
title="", it doesn’t underline the text)The main purpose of the tag is to have text that appears when you hover the mouse over the underlined text, e.g.: PIE has “Proto-Indo-European” appear when hovered over. But if you just want it to appear underlined, the title part can be an empty string.
Languagehat is a WordPress blog. I’m pretty sure all WordPress blogs had the tags that commenters could use, and their proper syntax, showing as a key above or below the comment box. Modern WordPress themes have eliminated that useful key, but the tags still work.
Sometimes, the
[abbr]tag can be used for unobvious text.. . .
The fact that hovering a mouse doesn’t work on most touch screen devices makes it problematic if you have something important in the title text.
It’s not a line, it’s separate dots, but certainly better than nothing…
Most don’t allow users to write HTML at all anymore; you have to use the strange graphic editor that allows almost nothing. We’re in a glorious exception here.
Different groups of users of the Seleucid era/epoch apparently had varying conventions about when it was “new year’s” and you increased the numeral of the current year by one, but I don’t think any of those conventions rolled over the odometer on Julian January 1, much less Gregorian January 1. Gregorian January 1 is used by various rivals of the Anno Domini system, e.g. in Taiwan (where my younger kids just arrived to visit their maternal grandparents) they just began Year 115 of the Min-kuo/Minguo era. Except of course that those particular grandparents’ political sympathies are with those who reportedly want to abolish that mode of reckoning because they did not find the KMT takeover of Taiwan (which introduced that system of year-designation to the island) a particular improvement from the eras of the various Meiji-through-Showa Japanese emperors that had preceded it.
For those who are still skeptical about this new-fangled Anno Domini thing, the soundest alternative is of course to fall back on this currently being Anno Mundi 7534. But it has been 7534 since September, so we ought to be used to it by now. (There are of course some factional disputes as to exactly when it started being September, as between users of the Improved Julian Calendar and continuing users of its unimproved predecessor, but a while ago now on either approach.)
The unimproved Julian Calendar itself had varying conventions in different areas about when the year-number changed – sometimes January 1, sometimes other points in the year (e.g. March 25 in Britain and its North American colonies). But I’m not sure if there’s anyone who currently uses the Gregorian Calendar as such (complete with Anno Domini year numbering) with an alternative to January 1 as the day to increase the year number.
Happy Julian Day 26001!
The unimproved Julian Calendar itself had varying conventions in different areas about when the year-number changed – sometimes January 1, sometimes other points in the year
Why did the year 7208 have only three months?
Why did the year 7208 have only
threefour months?And
[del]is another useful tag from days of yore.I would say that a dotted line is still a line (just as a dashed line is still a line). It’s not a solid line, to be sure.
Although, technically, even a “solid” line is a dotted line, because pixels. The dots are just immediately adjacent.
Using Unicode U+0332 “Combining Low Line” is supposed to underline, but it looks to be offset from the letter itself, as I look at it. Feh.
u̲n̲d̲e̲r̲l̲i̲n̲e̲
̲u̲n̲d̲e̲r̲l̲i̲n̲e
Ugh, right. Memo to Hat: If Songdog upgrades the WordPress engine, please make sure that the old comment system is available.
Trogue is also found in a few dictionaries, as a variant of trough used in mining — but GB gets almost no hits outside of dictionaries and glossaries, almost all of which copy the same definition, “a wooden trough forming a drain”. The English Dialect Dictionary has it, marked as obsolete, and citing an 1802 book, The Mineralogy of Derbyshire by John Mawe; it’s also in a historical book Lead Mining in the Peak District: “The water was discharged into wooden troughs or ‘trogues’, at the top of the barrel.”
If only this cold, cruel world had a tag for small caps.
In Gondor, they changed the date of the New Year to March 25* in Third Age 3019, commemorating the destruction of the Ring. However, the Third Age of Middle-earth continued until 29 September 3021, when the Ringbearers departed from the Grey Havens. This means that the first half of the year Fourth Age 1 technically fell in the Third Age.
* Tolkien blew it on the date here. He set the destruction of the Ring to fall on the date of the traditional English new year mentioned above. However, he had evidently forgotten that the hobbit months did not correspond exactly to those of the Julian or Gregorian calendars. The summer solstice** (Mid-Year’s Day) fell as one of three intercalary days (four in a leap year) between June and July, not on or around June 21.
** The longest day of the year is conventionally taken to be the official first day of summer nowadays, but it is also still known as Midsummer’s Day.
Huh. It is Trog /troːg/ in post-medieval German, modulo final fortition & stuff, but how that’d get to Derbyshire in 1802 is beyond me.
For those with the opposite inclination, of course, this is 76 After Present.
There’s the system used on the planet Winter, where it is always Year 1, and past dates are adjusted backwards from that.
Brett wrote:
“ Tolkien blew it on the date here. He set the destruction of the Ring to fall on the date of the traditional English new year mentioned above. However, he had evidently forgotten that the hobbit months did not correspond exactly to those of the Julian or Gregorian calendars. ”
I wonder if he addressed this anywhere? I don’t remember reading about it in his letters. At any rate, I think he chose March 25 as much because it’s the Feast of the Annunciation as it was the traditional English New Year. (I’ve also read that there is a tradition of it being the date of Christ’s Crucifixion.)
*However, he had evidently forgotten that the hobbit months did not correspond exactly to those of the Julian or Gregorian calendars.
Is it known that the forgetting happened in that order? That is, that he didn’t start by putting the destruction of the Ring on March 25 and then forget to change it when he changed the starting point of the Shire year?
The summer solstice** (Mid-Year’s Day) fell as one of three intercalary days (four in a leap year) between June and July, not on or around June 21.
Kind of you to spare people the detail that what he called June and July were really Forelithe and Afterlithe, and those were really some names in Westron.
** The longest day of the year is conventionally taken to be the official first day of summer nowadays, but it is also still known as Midsummer’s Day.*
In the northern hemisphere, anyway. At least, I’ve read that in Australia and New Zealand (and South Africa?), the seasons officially start on September 1, December 1, March 1, and June 1. That would work better than the equinoxes and solstices everywhere I’ve lived in the U.S. The real dates in the U.S., though, are: summer starts on Memorial Day and ends on Labor Day, winter starts on the day after Thanksgiving (which seems to have another name now), and spring starts when my first daffodil blooms.
Memo to Hat: If Songdog upgrades the WordPress engine, please make sure that the old comment system is available.
I have passed on the request to Songdog the Wise.
Also related must be ‘trug’ – a small wooden basket used in gardening.
These are the meteorological beginnings of the seasons.
Looks like the Kluge mess is complete. I’ll try to look it up tomorrow.
These are the meteorological beginnings of the seasons.
And they are the ones I use, to the annoyance of my wife.
In Ireland the astronomical dates are observed only by astronomers. Civilians vacillate between the meteorological dates and the Celtic dates one month earlier: the firsts of Feb/ May/Aug/ Nov aka Imbolc/ Beltane/Lughnasa/Samhain. (Apparently, Southern-hemisphere Celtic neo-pagans reverse the festival dates. Lugh knows what Equatorial Celtic neo-pagans do. ) The Irish names of September/ October translate “middle/end of autumn”.
There must be few places where climate and biosphere cues make four seasons of equal length a natural division, even within the regions where the human division arose in the native culture as opposed to via colonists.
What Molly said. I have heard that St. Bridget’s day was traditionally the day for ewes starting to lactate, so became another traditional day for start of spring. I am surprised that other countries of similar latitude do not employ this kind of displacement for seasons. England seems to be a special case, because the southern and most populous part is untypically temperate for its latitude.
There’s a shrine to saint Barbara in Linz that I quite liked. It’s next to a Stupa. I’m not religious, but it was nice walking up there, and also walking around the Stupa.
The only thing I know about St Barbara is that she is the patron saint of explosives*, something I learnt from a perversely enjoyable poem of G K Chesterton’s in her honour.
https://www.gkc.org.uk/gkc/books/Ballad_of_St_Barbara.html
(As with citing T S Eliot’s later poetry, I feel bound to disclaim any endorsement of the religious views implied in this work. Cracking poem, though.)
* Hence the heroine’s name in
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_Barbara
Pecunia non olet … (All Threads are One.)
The meteorological dates were perfectly fine where I grew up in the 1980s. Winter has generally shrunk since then. Conversely, in the Little Ice Age, May was equated with spring.
But, I mean, define “winter”. Ireland constantly takes the Gulf Stream to the face and hardly has a winter (or a summer for that matter). On the west coast it never freezes, so strawberry trees grow there; they can’t be found between there and the Mediterranean.
Well, the patron saint of miners. Probably because she was “thrown into a deep tower”. (…That’s the only occurrence of tiefer Turm in the entire German language; I suppose a dungeon under the tower and/or simple confusion about Latin altus.)
(And now I see Major Barbara is “Barbara Undershaft”. Checks out!)
These are the meteorological beginnings of the seasons.
I don’t remember encountering them in the U.S., though I see they exist here. Along the lines of mollymooly’s remark on Equatorial Celts, I imagine meteorologists in the tropics don’t use those definitions much.
Those meteorological definitions are definitely used in America.
Separate and apart from explosives more generally, early on in the development of gunpowder-based weaponry St. Barbara became the patroness of such artillerymen as were not so rigidly Protestant as to refuse saintly patronage altogether. She is to this day venerated by the United States Field Artillery Association, which, as a voluntary association governed by officers safely retired from active military service, can take the sort of theological positions which the U.S. federal government proper would avoid as none of its business. https://www.fieldartillery.org/legend-of-saint-barbara I am not sure whether they endorse Chesterton’s rather fussy explication of their patroness’ role, however.
One can also think in terms of I guess “sociological” seasons. Summer starts when the school year ends, and ends when the next school year starts. During the school year, you can distinguish fall from winter from spring by ascertaining what sport your local high school is actively competing against other schools in: football = fall; basketball-or-ice-hockey = winter; baseball = spring. Among the professional leagues (and also to a considerable extent at the college level) the sports seasons now all overlap to varying extents due to filthy lucre and niche specialization, so they are less useful as indicators. Except I guess for the argument developed by the late A.B. Giamatti that in New England (and presumably only in New England) summer ends and fall begins in any given year at the exact moment the Red Sox are mathematically eliminated from contention for the pennant.
ABG was absolutely correct, with the curse-breaking victories of the john henry era marking the onset of palpable climate change in the region.
Summer starts when the school year ends, and ends when the next school year starts.
That only works in countries with long summer breaks; in Germany, the summer break is only six weeks, so too short to encompass all of summer (on the other hand, still too long for Northern Germany, where they joke that summer is only 5 minutes, so you can miss it if you take a bathroom break at the wrong moment.)
Even in Austria (nine weeks) that doesn’t work because summer begins much earlier than early (eastern) or mid- (western) July.
Applicability in the sparsely populated north of the country is questionable, because there (at elevations up to 1000 m) there is “nine months of winter and three months of cold”.
Funny that they tell the same jokes about the Northern parts of Germany and Austria as about Northern Norway.
The Norwegian schoolyear ends a couple of days before Midsummer Eve (June 23), and the summer break lasts for 8 weeks (or 9 when calendar drift makes it necessary)
These sociological approaches, like the meteorological ones, require a local “climate” that fits and thus cannot be applied universally. (Global applicability is one advantage of the astronomical seasons, even if they don’t stably correlate with anything at planet-surface level you’d actually be interested in …)
It is, for example, likewise the case in both Germany and Austria that you can’t use the obvious presence/absence of high school baseball games to determine whether it is or isn’t Frühling.
The insistence that things be applied universally is one of the sins of the modern world.
I just heard an episode on words for more than four seasons on the radio/podcast A Way With Words: in Alaska winter is followed by breakup, then greenup; there are many regional terms for “a period of cold weather following the first taste of warm spring weather”, such as blackberry winter.
Season boundary dates previously at Language Hat for Russia and other countries, taking off from the question “Does Kiev feel (or rather, did it then feel) autumnal in early September?”
mollymooly: “MW3NID has… dial |th or |ft”
Thanks for checking that. I think the variants are badly served by the space restrictions of the Collegiate: there’s no way to tell from its truncated list that “troth” is regional. (And oops, I didn’t notice you already pointed out trogue in MW.)
This is really a job for DARE. They have an extensive entry for trough pronunciations, with maps for the first two:
Or indeed Frühjahr, but I don’t know where that’s in actual use.
Oh, so it’s not just German (Axt, Saft, jemand/niemand…)! In German it’s universal in the plural, too, though (Äxte, Säfte).
I finally did… and found the source I remembered (Kroonen 2011) actually said much less than I thought. Wiktionary, the DWDS and the highly incomplete etymological dictionary of Germanic (Kroonen 2013) don’t help much. However, trough = Trog itself ( < *truɣa- < *drukó-) isn’t a *n-stem in the first place, even though trug might be (guess: < *trugga- > *druknó-?) and the other words I was thinking of – Truhe “chest”*, which has /kx/ in a Walser dialect – are. Although *tr- survived the High German consonant shift unchanged so that *dr- merged into it, it doesn’t seem to be clear if the t in Truhe is etymological; Kroonen 2011 reconstructed it as *þruxan- ~ *þrukkan- < *truknó- but didn’t comment on that. I can confirm, however, that the h is real: /trʊxŋ/ in my dialect (sg. = pl.).
* Large wooden box with a lid, often ornamented, containing treasure or clothes. Theoretically portable.
@dm
Is Truhe most frequently used as part of the word for “freezer”?
Oh, yes, Kühltruhe – but somehow that isn’t nativized in my dialect. (Well, Kühlschrank “fridge” barely is; Schrank “cupboard” doesn’t otherwise occur there at all, it’s all Kasten, and yet we haven’t imported the Viennese Eiskasten.) Instead, the most common occurrence there is in “wheelbarrow”, standard Schubkarre, dialect… uh… *Scheibtruhe.
*Scheiben for schieben “shove, push” otherwise occurs only in *Ballscheiben: sitting on the floor, legs spread, and rolling a ball towards a very little child.
Or indeed Frühjahr, but I don’t know where that’s in actual use.
This is the usual German term I tend to encounter for “the second/spring half of the football/soccer season, after winter break” (with Herbst for the first/autumn half), but I have no idea which specific area it’s from, if any.
I don’t have my dtv German language Atlas with me, but IIRC, both Frühling and Frühjahr are used over big areas. I have Frühling. Both are normal in everyday speech, different to Lenz, which nowadays is mostly poetic.
Merriam-Webster’s *Second* New International, from 1934, had a note at trough giving the -th pronunciation even more prominence: “the dialectal pron. trȯth is widespread in America, and known in England”. (No such note in any earlier edition as far as I can find.) Maybe MW was especially aware of that pronunciation because they’re in New England, where it was “predominant” according to the 1939 Atlas.
I wonder, though, how long it’s been since they re-checked that pronunciation note; it’s been the same since the 8th Collegiate (1973), and the variant pronunciations must have been fading since then.
A search for “dough trough rhyme” turned up a few sources indicating that the bakers’ /tro/ pronunciation existed in the past in England and perhaps even now in Australia. One Australian distinguished the pronunciations by meaning:
The OED has a headword entry for dough trough, revised 2018, but they didn’t take the opportunity to note the bakers’ pronunciation — though the earliest citation, from 1440, spells it “Dowe trowe”.
Except I guess for the argument developed by the late A.B. Giamatti that in New England (and presumably only in New England) summer ends and fall begins in any given year at the exact moment the Red Sox are mathematically eliminated from contention for the pennant.
A witticism that has aged badly due to the 21st century Red Sox being generally in contention and winning numerous titles, and thereby often still playing well into late October, as well as the relative unimportance to younger people of the Red Sox vs the Patriots and Celtics.
I’ve been familiar with the jerrycan etymology for many years, ever since I first had to translate the German word for those things. The German term is Kanister, and it’s one of the German words most frequently mistranslated into English. It will surprise no one to learn that it virtually always gets translated as “canister,” and this has been happening so much for so long that even the latest AI chatbots tend to use that as their default translation of it. But canisters are cylindrical, whereas Kanister are very definitely not…
There are a number of perfectly good translations into English – jerrycan is the narrowest in potential range of meaning, but bottle, jug, or just container will often be more contextually appropriate, especially if the item is made of plastic rather than metal. But the “canister” mistranslation is unfortunately rife, so much so that it even seems to have caused cross-contamination in other language pairs: I’ve seen people translate the French equivalent “bidon” as “canister” too. I wonder if there’s a linguistic term for that: the phenomenon of an incorrect translation of a term from one language resulting in the same incorrect word being again applied incorrectly to translate a matching term from another language.
@Vanya: It’s been more than twenty years since I lived in Boston. However, it was remarkable that baseball was still by far the most important sport in the local culture. I don’t think that was something you could find in any other American city at that time. Both the Patriots and the Red Sox were really good* around the time we moved away, but the Patriots never had the same degree of cultural relevance or fan devotion** as the Red Sox.
* This was near the beginning of a ten year year period in which the Patriots, the Red Sox, the Celtics, and the Bruins each won at least one championship, with a total of seven between them. It was a golden age for Boston sports.
** One hot evening, we were watching a Red Sox playoff game with the windows open. The officiating was terrible. There were multiple bad calls against the Sox, including two that cost them potentially game-winning rallies, both involving runners who were, according to the television cameras, obviously safe, but who were called out anyway. One of the umpires apologized publicly about blowing his call the next day. (There was also a long line drive that hit the wall about eight inches too low to be a tying home run, which wasn’t bad officiating but was frustrating nonetheless.) The last bad call (not the one that got the apology) cost the Sox their last good chance to tie the game. I yelled angrily at the television (not something I do very often), and so did about a hundred thousand other people. Through the open window, we could hear the whole Boston area yelling. It was a surprisingly affecting experience.
I wonder if there’s a linguistic term for that: the phenomenon of an incorrect translation of a term from one language resulting in the same incorrect word being again applied incorrectly to translate a matching term from another language.
I don’t know of a general term, but I call it the “echelon” problem. (See also Pathos.)
Through the open window, we could hear the whole Boston area yelling. It was a surprisingly affecting experience.
I had that same experience when the Mets won Game 6 of the 1986 World Series (sorry, Boston fans) — it was perhaps the highlight of my life as a New Yorker. I was watching it with a friend who lived in the East Village, and when it came to its unexpected end we poured out into the streets with a zillion other joyous fans. (I don’t remember the remainder of the evening…)
I definitely remember the late innings of games 6 and 7 of that ’86 Series. However, we lived in Oregon at the time, so the Sox losses were not particularly noticed otherwise.
After the city-wide screaming had died down during the playoff game I mentioned, I turned to my wife and asked: “If I left now, do you think I could make it to Fenway in time for the post-game riot?” A few years later, my younger brother was on hand for the celebrations when the Red Sox finally did win the World Series, but he and his friends headed back to MIT when people started setting cars on fire.
>the relative unimportance to younger people of the Red Sox vs the Patriots and Celtics.
40 years ago it was none of the above. Candlepin bowling was the top rated sport in Boston week in and week out.
@Nat Schockley: But canisters are cylindrical
American Heritage says “usually cylindrical”, Merriam-Webster says “often cylindrical”, and the OED says nothing about the shape. (However, its entry needs to be updated; its latest citation for that sense is from 1828.)
My prototypical canisters—the matched set my mother kept flour, sugar, etc., in—were frustums of cones, which you may be including under “cylindrical”, but I wouldn’t object to calling a rectangular container a canister. I would object if it’s for gasoline, since the only name for that I have is “gas can”.
It is obvious to me that a jerry can is not a “canister,” but less because of the shape than because a vessel holding liquid somehow inherently can’t be a canister. I wondered if that reaction was idiosyncratic, but wiktionary’s sense 1 for “canister” is “A cylindrical or rectangular container usually of lightweight metal, plastic, or laminated pasteboard used for holding a dry product (as tea, crackers, flour, matches),” so I guess not.
OTOH, wiktionary’s sense 2 is “Any of various cylindrical metal receptacles usually with a removable close-fitting top,” which is narrower as to shape than sense 1 but perhaps (implication from silence) broader as to permitted contents.
I guess the set in our pantry holding flour, sugar etc. are rectangular – square in a cross-section parallel to the counter/floor but significantly taller than a cube so the sides are rectangles.
1986 World Series
I was in Boston at the end and saw the street full of desperate vendors trying to sell cartloads of “Sox win” T-shirts for pennies.
Annals of verb morphology: the linked Wikipedia page contains 4 instances of “flew out”, 1 “flied out”, and 1 “flied to left”.
For me, what makes a gas can not a canister is primarily that it has an off-center cap or spout, rather than a lid. That its purpose is holding a fluid is relevant pragmatically, since that determines how the container opens. However, I am used to seeing gas cannister used for cylinders containing fuel or liquid nitrogen (involving different senses of gas). The prototypical canister in my mind is used for story dry material and has a uniform cross section, but neither of those things is a requirement.
Same for me — at least, not a liquid that is poured out; there are canisters of pepper spray, which I think is like a canister of pressurized gas rather than a canister of flour.
Agreed with that too.
And some of these dictionary definitions don’t mention what I consider an essential feature of a canister: a tight-fitting lid. You put things in canisters that you want to keep dry (flour) or dark (film). I think the tight-fitting lid is probably why the word was extended to pressurized gas canisters. (The OED missed the pressurized gas sense in its 1970s-80s updates, even though it is much older than the 1970s. They do use “gas canister” in the definition of one of the senses of bottle, as in propane bottle, revised 2016.)
mollymooly: I have heard of a “jerry can” but would not have recognised “jerrican”, which looks like a cousin of “pemmican”. Dictionaries vary as to which spelling to prefer out of “jerry can” “jerrycan” “jerrican”
As much as I support togetherwriting of compounds also in English, the spelling with <i> had me patterning it with Puertorican.
That’s both awesome and on the early side for loss of /x/…
It seems can and canister are not etymologically related. Add it to the list.
Well, “canister” has an obvious Latin source (“canistrum”) while “canne” was a good Anglo-Saxon word, but things get more uncertain when you try to figure out the pedigree of hypothesized Proto-Germanic *kannǭ. One source says that one speculative theory (perhaps not the majority theory …) suggests early influence from Latin “canna,” which is more definitely connected to canistrum, although it looks like both of those two in Latin are loanwords from Greek and the derivation of the latter from the former probably occurred there.
in New England… summer ends and fall begins in any given year at the exact moment the Red Sox are mathematically eliminated from contention for the pennant…
A witticism that has aged badly due to the 21st century Red Sox… often still playing well into late October
as i gestured towards earlier: have you been in new england in september or october lately? the giamatti* rule holds up, as well as it ever has, under current climatological conditions. even the newengland.com fall foliage tracker doesn’t claim any counties hit peak leaf color before the second half of october, and when it comes to eastern massachusetts**, none are claimed to reach peak before the last few days of the month.
.
* awful person, by the way, despite his oddly glowing reputation in the baseball world (which he got hired for specifically for being aggressively anti-labor***). pro-apartheid, anti-union, even anti-bladderball.
** discounting the cape, because it’s a different bioregion and its main broadleaf tree, poison ivy, is red by july.
*** despite getting his ass handed to him after provoking a 10-week strike rather than recognizing Local 34 (the yale clerical & technical workers union).
“Pan” is also a mystery:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pan
GPC similarly suggests that Welsh pan is from this Late Latin panna, not that it helps much. To muddy the waters yet further, GPC also suggests that Old Irish cann might be related, and cites a Gaulish panna. IIRC, Thurneysen actually pegs Old Irish cann as a loan from Brythonic (can’t check, as I’m far from my books just now.)
…and so I learn that poison ivy is much less ivy-like than I expected. However, the Wikipedia article does say: “Poison ivies can grow as small plants, shrubs, or climbing vines.” Trees, too?
i’m overstating the case several ways, but i’ve seen some pretty substantial poison ivy shrubs on the cape (about the size of some of the scrub pines that people are happy to call trees out there, though smaller than the maples that do exist further from the waterline). i’ve also had the unenviable experience of waking up in the middle of a field of waist-to-chest-high poison ivy shrubs after pitching my tent after dark (luckily with no serious exposure, because it had been cold enough for long pants the night before).
all of which to say that poison ivy can’t quite ambush a person from above like a manchineel, but you might be able to sit in the shade if you find a large one that’s not surrounded by smaller relatives.
A [large square metal container for olives and such] is a recent-traditional percussion instrument in Jewish Yemeni music (e.g. Aharon Amram and Ofra Haza, here, Amram here.) I can’t come up with a satisfying English word for it other than maybe a tin, though that does not sound very AmE. ‘Can’ sounds too small to me. What would you native anglophones call it?
(The Hebrew is פַּח pakh, literally ‘sheet metal’, also used for ‘trash can’. פַּחִית pakhít is used for a small can, like a typical-sized one for soup or such.)
as an instrument i’d probably call it a metal cajón, but i wouldn’t necessarily expect to be understood.
but when i have to talk about one as an object, i usually call it “that big [contents] tin” – if it were round, it would be “that big [contents] can”.
I’m with rozele in thinking tin works with [contents], for example cookie tin. Not sure whether his reticence rejects an undefined tin, but for me, “that big tin” would prompt the question “tin what?” The contents as modifying noun prevents a crash blossom by characterizing tin as an unlikely head noun.
“Drumming a tin can” and “drumming a cookie tin” sound OK to me. But if I heard “drumming a tin” I might think at first that I misheard it, though later I might figure it out.
(Putting aside any Günter Grass associations.)
I wonder if there’s a linguistic term for that: the phenomenon of an incorrect translation of a term from one language resulting in the same incorrect word being again applied incorrectly to translate a matching term from another language.
I don’t know of a general term, but I call it the “echelon” problem. (See also Pathos.)
Thanks for the “echelon” links, but that’s not what I meant – I wasn’t referring to the initial “false friend” error that causes Kanister to be translated as canister (which is indeed an example of your “echelon” situation) but rather the weirder and rarer secondary stage, in which that same erroneous translation gets transposed to a completely separate language pair, i.e. “canister” sometimes being used incorrectly as the English translation of French “bidon” simply because it is so often used incorrectly as the English translation of German “Kanister”, and Kanister=bidon.
Admittedly, this probably doesn’t happen very often. One would hope not, at least. I haven’t encountered many examples; this is the only one I can remember offhand.
the giamatti* rule holds up, as well as it ever has, under current climatological conditions
It does not because Giamatti‘s joke was from an era when the Red Sox were usually eliminated around Labor Day, so Red Sox „summer“ is not supposed to coincide with normal perception of summer. It’s shorter because the Red Sox were always losing pennant races to the Yankees*.
So I suppose you are right that climate change has conspired to keep Giamatti‘s statement more literally accurate despite the Red Sox recent record of success, but the underlying humor is now lost.
*Giamatti’s boomer observation suffers from yet another anachronism – pennant races are now longer as big a deal in a world of Wild Cards and playoffs.
The prototypical פחית is a soft-drink can. Olives and tomato paste come in a קופסת שימורים, a “preserves box” (sometimes פחית שימורים but less common afaict).
Literally, Blechtrommel is “sheet-metal drum”, Blech being an everyday word. Together with tinfoil being Alufolie, tin (Zinn) is hardly in anyone’s active vocabulary. …Lead is, though, because “pencil” remains Bleistift “lead peg”.
Literally, Blechtrommel is “sheet-metal drum”
But the “tin” in “tin drum” is also not really tin. “Tin toys” were made of tinplate (“Weissblech”), which is a thin sheet of steel coated with tin to prevent corrosion. “Tin soldier” and “Tin drum” just sound better than “tinplate soldier” and “tinplate drum” I guess.
As far as I know only English speakers refer to that kind of toy as a “tin toy”. In Italian they are made of “latta”, which has the same meaning as “Weissblech”, not “stagno”, and in Russian similarly they are made of “жесть”, not “олово”.
Thanks for the “echelon” links, but that’s not what I meant
Ah. But as you say, your issue “probably doesn’t happen very often,” so it’s not surprising there’s no word for it.
pennant races are now longer as big a deal in a world of Wild Cards and playoffs.
One of the many factors contributing to my loss of interest in the game (though I still perk up when the Mets show signs of life).
Hey, Giamatti may have been all sorts of things subject to criticism, but he was too old (born 1938) to be a Boomer. FWIW, the context of his claim was a longer-than-average summer, where the Sox were not eliminated until October 1 (1977 – at the hands of the Orioles and to the benefit of the Yankees). This was after the innovation of divisional play, but being mathematically eliminated from a (that year) seven-team race in the AL East would not necessarily happen any later in a typical year than elimination in an old-time eight-team entire AL.
…There were actually Zinnsoldaten, and they seem to have been pretty common – common enough to show up in all sorts of rhetorical figures – till… WWII, I guess. Then they disappeared completely; I don’t think I’ve ever seen one except once or twice in a museum.
(No GI Joe figures either.)
I knew Bart the Comish was too old to be a Boomer. In fact, if I had had to guess his age, I would probably have estimate he was at least ten years older than he actually was. I remember that he died relatively young, but he was old enough to have already been president of Yale before he became president of the National League. However, he was actually only forty when he took over at Yale and fifty-one when he died.
As much as I support togetherwriting of compounds also in English, the spelling with <i> had me patterning it with Puertorican.
I’m stuck on
A wonderful jug is the jerrican,
though it carries much less than a ferrican.
Foornote
Yuval is right. I was off regarding pakhit.