Misunderstood things I thought while reading...

I read a lot of "Harlequin romances" back in the 70s. Mostly the young ladies (always very young and virginal) were either secretaries or nurses, and they were set in Britain or sometimes a former British colony. So...I thought 1) all nurses were nuns because they were called Sister. It was confusing to my teenage mind that so many nuns fell in love, lol. 2) Words like "neighbour", "colour", "favourite" were pronounced "oooh", kind of like how we Americans pronouce "velour". 3)I imagined all Brits ate Jello pudding for dessert. I finally figured out that "pudding" is just another word for "dessert". And a Canadian co-worker set me straight on spelling (I was in my 20s!)...she was complaining that her daughter got some words wrong on a spelling test, but they were correct to a Canadian.

Anyone else have to unlearn something they got wrong while reading?

"Anyone else have to unlearn something they got wrong while reading?"

So many pronunciations. I still have a difficult time sorting the spelling between American English and English English. I am not a good speller at the best of times.

The confusion about "pants." Also "caravans."

I'm sure there are many more. I'm still trying to sort through the different police orders of Britton and France. Probably something like our local town police, the county sheriffs, Hiway patrolmen, state police, federal police, etc., here; only the titles are different, so it isn't immediately apparent to me which organization is being referred to in my murder mysteries.

" I finally figured out that "pudding" is just another word for "dessert". "

Well not really no. Often used interchangeably, but pudding is usually a sub-set of dessert with a few exceptions that prove the rule. "Steak and kidney pudding" is not a dessert! But it is a suet-sponge/pastry dish which defines pudding. Usually served with a sauce, custard cream etc, whereas other desserts eg cake at al, probably wouldn't be. Pie lies very much in-between!

Police - even living here, I'm not sure I know. We don't have many layers, there's a county/city regional force which is internally divided into different types of crime, and probably has outlying branches that contact the regional hub, but no other distinctions. I don't think there's a national equivalent of the FBI. Works in reverse I've no idea about the sheriff etc which sounds very wild western.

In the U.S., a gymnasium is a place for physical exercise or athletic training. Almost always shortened to gym.
I was puzzled about why some Europeans were studying literature or mathematics at the gymnasium. I pictured them working out with old-fashioned medicine balls while discussing Milton. Must be a brainy sort of gym.

>4 TorMented: In Stellenbosch, the top Afrikaans high school is called the Paul Roos Gymnasium. AFAIK this is the only school so named in South Africa. Calling a high school a gymnasium is, I believe, a particularly Teutonic trait.

In America, "dessert" is anything sweet, usually but not always, a baked product, at the end of the meal. If you eat it (pie, cake, etc.) at any other time it's a snack. At least it is in my family. :)

I think we had a discussion on LT several years ago about American pudding. I seem to remember that there doesn't appear to be any equivalent in European cuisine; perhaps the closest is a mousse? A couple of exceptions I can think of are "rice pudding" and "bread pudding", which are more similar to British pudding (I think). Jello pudding and banana pudding seem to be a totally American thing. Set me straight if I'm wrong about that!

>6 theretiredlibrarian: I think what you think of as Jello pudding might be a fruit flavour jelly (with or without pieces of fruit) in the UK. Not sure about banana pudding - perhaps banana custard (sliced bananas, jam with custard poured on top)? We do have cold instant mix puddings like Angel Delight (mix with milk, pour into bowls to set) or a more traditional blancmange made with cornflour and some kind of a flavouring (not a blancmanger which is a medieval savoury dish!). Junket is another cold set dessert (which I disliked as a child).

Mousses are nice - obviously they mostly come from the European tradition (although I have a recipe for chocolate & orange mousse in one of my cookery books). In fact, there are some very nice ones imported here - Bonne Maman, Gü, etc.

Jello is the brand name. They make gelatins (probably what you call fruit flavor jelly), and pudding mixes. Our puddings are most like a mousse, but heavier (?) is the only way I can describe it. They have a milk base. Here's a link to a commercial (back in the 80s/90s Bill Cosby was their pitchman. I've chosen a different one). https://www.ispot.tv/ad/7qhO/jell-o-rough-day

As for banana pudding (a Southern classic!), it's best made with the Nilla Wafer recipe : https://backofthebox.com/recipes/desserts/original-nilla-banana-pudding/

As for Jello gelatin...I can live without it. Some pretty dreadful things were done to it in the 60s and 70s! I give you this: https://www.pinterest.com/cookeryincarla/terrifying-vintage-jello-recipes/

Then there are all the pot plants in homes across the ocean which caused my eyebrows to raise when I first heard the term. Here they are potted plants, but I've also eaten potted shrimp.

Not a book, but a song: as I heard it, "so bear me, cross the mercy..." I never thought much about it. Until my husband set me straight and told me it was a river, Mersey, and he took the ferry.

I blame this on the fact that I didn't have a record collection as a youth, the only popular songs I heard were on the radio so I didn't read the name of the song.

>8 theretiredlibrarian: That banana pudding looks like a banana custard with a meringue topping constructed like a Roman placenta (which is a type of cake not something obstetrical). Banana custard here is bananas with jam (slice lengthways, spread with jam, put in a dish, pour hot custard on top - Birds is the brand in the UK, let cool. The custard needs to be thick enough to set when cool.)

Hartleys is the jelly cube brand in the UK: https://www.hartleysfruit.co.uk/our-range/hartleys-jelly/hartleys-jelly-cubes/, so it sounds much like Jello. We would only use these for desserts - I recall making trifle with jelly cubes. Drain a tin of fruit (usually peaches or mixed fruit), boil up water and jelly cubes until the jelly had dissolved, and make up to the recommended volume with the fruit juice. Allow the jelly mix to cool down but not set. Place sponge slices into a bowl, cover with the strained fruit and then the jelly mix. Allow to cool completely and set. Cover with a layer of thick custard, allow that to set. Decorate with whipped cream and perhaps some glacé fruit and flaked almonds. Serve with cream. For sherry trifle you'd soak the sponge in sherry and omit the jelly layer.

The other thing about jelly cubes is that they are supposed to be good for hair and nails if you eat a cube a day, but I think you'd need to make sure it's not a vegan cube these days (gelatine-based not agar-based). For savoury dishes, we'd use plain aspic - Dr Oetker Gelatine, basically. The days when one made one's own from butcher's bones are long gone. Heck, I rarely make proper stock because it's such a fiddle.

For me, the disconnect is car descriptors - you say hood, we say bonnet, you say trunk, we say boot, you say fender, we say bumper. I'm kind of used to that now, although to me a fender is what you hang over the side of a boat to prevent scrapes to the paint job when moored to a jetty.

Even in America, different words have different meanings. My brother in law referred to his pickup truck as a rig (he lived in Washington state); to me a rig an 18-wheeler truck (I'm from the Midwest).

Also pop vs soda (although my dad, from the Ozarks, said sody pop, lol).

And I never knew how to pronounce "slough"...it was in a Little House (Laura Ingalls Wilder) book, and I never knew until an adult whether it was "slue", "sluff", "slow", or "slou". The answer is "slue" if it's a marshy backwater (like in the LH book), and it's "sluff" if you're referring to something being cast off, like a snakeskin. It never occurred to me to look in the dictionary, probably because I was too engrossed in the story to be bothered.

>10 Maddz: Stray dumb thought: is the obstetrical meaning derived from the Roman cake?

>12 theretiredlibrarian: Soda to me is soda water - plain carbonated water, usually used to dilute spirits without changing the flavour (as in whiskey & soda). Hence soda siphons in period writings. You can use sodas in the US sense - e.g. Bacardi & coke, brandy & ginger.

>13 hfglen: According to Wikipedia, yes. It's because of the shape rather than any other resemblance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placenta

The Roman cake:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placenta_cake
https://www.tastinghistory.com/recipes/placenta
https://pass-the-garum.blogspot.com/2013/01/placenta.html
https://historicalitaliancooking.home.blog/english/recipes/ancient-roman-placent...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pl%C4%83cint%C4%83 (for a modern version)

I've tried a recipe for libum based on Cato, which is a similar recipe without the layering, and found it a bit claggy as it used mascarpone (basically too soft). Trouble is, feta is too salty, as is pecorino (which dates back to Rome), so perhaps a soft goats cheese instead.

At some point (in my copious free time! I wish!) I must make up some tracta to use for placenta (a fiddly process but it's been suggested that something like wonton skins make a reasonable substitute).

>5 hfglen: Now that you mention it, I think the stories I've seen that reference were translated from German or set in Germany.

Here are two words that caused a lot of confusion and laughter in school.
One is toilet, in the old sense of grooming or washing. I think it was in "Around the World in 80 Days" that said that a certain character would brush his hair a few times and that "completed his toilet."
Another is girdle, which used to refer to a cord or a decorative band of flowers that women would wear around their waists. One story or epic poem had a fair damsel tossing her girdle to the hero. You can imagine the image that brought to my mind.

>16 TorMented: Of course, the usage of the word bathroom to mean a toilet (restroom) causes raised eyebrows here. In older properties, often the room with the bath (i.e. bathroom) is in a different room to the one with the toilet (i.e. toilet). This can cause problems - in my mother's house the upstairs sanitary arrangements were separate rooms - though this did allow us to eventually fit a bidet in the bathroom, and the downstairs room was a toilet only (although later we shoehorned in a shower). Estate agents (i.e. realtors I think?) usually refer to a combined arrangement as a family bath(room) or an en-suite if accessed via a bedroom rather than from a communal area.

Given the solid nature of some girdles (in the modern sense), that could have been painful...

>17 Maddz: Just to add to the confusion, estate agents (US: realtors -- there's another one) here may advertise a house as having "3 bedrooms, 2½ bathrooms mes", meaning that there's a guest loo near the front door, a bathroom shared between two bedrooms, and the main bedroom has an en suite bathroom.

And sometimes the "half bath" is referred to as the "powder room". And sometimes you can see 2 3/4 baths in real estate listings, which means one bathroom has a tub, and the 3/4 bath has a shower. My house has a room downstairs between the back porch and the living room in which the downstairs bath is located. Because the room has a very small closet, it is considered a bedroom. I've made it into a library/office. Real estate is weird.

>19 theretiredlibrarian: I always think of a powder room to be a ladies loo in a department store or hotel... Of course, it derives from the powdering room in a stately home - where the ladies of the house had their hair powdered without getting everything else covered in powder. Once hair powder went out of fashion, the room was re-purposed.

Not while reading but while watching Sir Tony Robinson on a train from Thailand and Malaysia. It was an overnight train and he said he "slept like a baby". Really?! Did he truly mean that he slept for only an hour or two and then spent the rest of the night howling the place down? I doubt it. We need a simile that holds at least some water.

>21 hfglen: Slept like a cat.

like a log. Like the dead. Like the inevitable consequences. Like Cthulhu.

>23 MrAndrew: "I slept like Cthulhu last night." - I like that one a lot.

Like a log or like a rose is what we say in Dutch. I understand the log, but afaik, roses don't sleep. 🤷‍♀️ Maybe it's referring to Sleeping beauty?

>23 MrAndrew: But having only read the name Cthulhu, I wouldn't know how to pronounce it.

>26 MrsLee: H.P. Lovecraft wrote:

The name of the hellish entity was invented by beings whose vocal organs were not like man's, hence it has no relation to the human speech equipment. The syllables were determined by a physiological equipment wholly unlike ours, hence could never be uttered perfectly by human throats ... The actual sound -- as nearly as any human organs could imitate it or human letters record it -- may be taken as something like Khlûl'-hloo, with the first syllable pronounced gutturally and very thickly. The u is about like that in full; and the first syllable is not unlike klul in sound, hence the h represents the guttural thickness.

References:
• BoardgameGeek.com
• CJ Henderson And The True Pronunciation of "Cthulhu"

>27 ScoLgo: Lol, I think I'll stick with cat, log or dead. :D

If you said that you slept like the dead, you might confuse a lot of people nowadays. The dead generally don't sleep anymore.

A rose, by any other name, would sleep as sweet.

>20 Maddz: I thought powder room got it's name from the old euphemism of women going to the ladies room "to powder their nose"!

Also, I just this minute realized I've been pronouncing "euphemism" incorrectly! I've been putting an "n" instead of the first "m". MY. ENTIRE. LIFE. Huh, the things you learn from an autocorrect.

>30 theretiredlibrarian: Other way round I think!

re: our conversation about British/American foods, I found this today:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMnMzbzrIP0

>33 theretiredlibrarian: This was a lot of fun!

I've found this guy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SJ-wTR2H6M&t=305s

He's done quite a few, including several just about American accents.

Also, tonight while preparing cornbread for supper, I remembered another word that confused my young reader self: corn. I remember reading "corn" in English novels, and distinctly remember learning that corn was a New World crop. So, is "corn" any kind of grain? I believe what we call "corn", British call "maize"?

Perhaps slightly different than regional confusion is my anecdote. I was a rather precocious reader, and, (likely in the interest of stopping me from reading books which were on my intelligence level but had undesirable topics for my age,) my parents set me on some rather antiquated kiddie lit. There was a specific q word which was introduced into my vocabulary from these readings, which I had learned from context meant "strange, odd, wrong."

My parents very quickly corrected me when I began using this word in vocal speech, but the subject of sexuality being very taboo in my house, I didn't learn why I wasn't to repeat it until I heard the slur applied to a schoolmate years later.

I thought when I first learned the word, that it had a nice sort of ring to it, and was fun to say. It became a lot less fun when it was applied to me. Ah, the things we learn...

>35 theretiredlibrarian: In older British English, "corn" was any kind of grain. The Corn Laws, infamous as one of the causes of the mass starvation in Ireland in the 1840s, applied to any "corn, grain, meal or flour" and the table to the Act of 1828 ("An Act to amend the laws relating to the importation of corn") specifies duties on wheat, barley, and oats, but not maize — probably because there was then no growing of maize in the United Kingdom of Britain and Ireland. If you have the patience, the Internet Archive has the text; the table is at page 490. It's not a fun read; I'm a lawyer of sorts and I find it excruciating.

More on the vicissitudes of the word that >36 GraceCollection: refers to:

• Brendan Behan's first play was The Quare Fellow ("quare" meaning about to be hanged)*

• "in Queer Street" once meant "bankrupt".

* From Wikipedia:

The play is set in Mountjoy Prison, Dublin. The anti-hero of the play, The Quare Fellow, is never seen or heard; he functions as the play's central conceit. He is a man condemned to die on the following day, for killing his brother. It revolts his fellow inmates far less than that of The Other Fellow, a very camp, almost Wildean, homosexual man.
...
The title is taken from a Hiberno-English pronunciation of queer, meaning "strange" or "unusual". In context, the word lacks the denotation of homosexuality that it holds today. The play does feature a gay character, but he is referred to as The Other Fellow.

>35 theretiredlibrarian:
I know that growing up on Ireland I would be used to considering all types of grain to be corn*, and that there were different types of corn, namely wheat, maize, oats, barley, etc... You are correct that what Americans call corn is maize.

It is similar to how we called all corvids crows while there are specific types of crow, namely ravens, rooks, jays, magpies, jack-daws, chough, etc...

>35 theretiredlibrarian: Lindsey Davis had an anecdote about an American reader objecting to the use of the phrase 'the corn dole' in Imperial Rome and wanting her to correct it in subsequent editions. Her response was that it was in the Bible as in 'Ruth amid the alien corn' and did the reader not want that corrected as well? (Or perhaps Ruth was in an alien corn field in America...)

>39 Maddz: Ah--so crop circles might have a biblical origin?

>40 Marissa_Doyle: Ah yes, the rant is here: https://lindseydavis.co.uk/features/rants/

And my mistake - it wasn't the corn dole, it was the headgear of the Arval Brotherhood.