OT - Speaking of Britspeak..

If the British word for cookies is biscuits, what's the British word for
biscuits?
Braveslady

"braves-lady" wrote in message
news:NciTa.8151$If5.7051@lakeread06...
If the British word for cookies is biscuits, what's the British word for
biscuits?

Biscuits . . . which covers pretty much all the bases in Britain, from sweet
things North Americans would call 'cookies' to the sorts of things you'd put
cheese or cold meat or caviar or whatever on (Brits would say 'cheese and
biscuits', with the 'biscuit' extended to include things like Cornish
wafers, cream crackers, Ritz crackers, oat cakes, etc.). As with so many
words, context is everything.

Barbara

wrote:

If the British word for cookies is biscuits, what's the British word for
biscuits?
Braveslady

They don't *have* anything quite like our biscuits. Scones would be about the
closest, and that's not very close. I suppose they could say "American
biscuits."

--Helen

If the British word for cookies is biscuits, what's the British word for
biscuits?
Braveslady

They don't *have* anything quite like our biscuits.

What are your biscuits like? Ours are mostly sweet, flat and crispy-crumbly.
We have digestive biscuits (wholemeal and wheatmeal; basically a kind of
unleavened sweetened bread mix), chocolate biscuits (similar, but with a
layer of chocolate on one side), wafers (=layered biscuits, with various
kinds of gunk between the layers), rich tea biscuits (biscuits for Puritans
or Spartans), shortbread biscuits, oatcakes, chocolate chip, ginger, etc. I
have memories of something that's chocolate on one side, with a bit of
marmalade underneath it, and the biscuit mix is much softer than usual, and
a coconut one that's also quite soft and kind of chewy, but mostly they're
crispy. It's the flat shape, and the fact that they're all typically served
with afternoon tea, that gives them a common name.

"Cheese and biscuits" normally implies what we call crackers (savoury
biscuits) or unsweetened oatmeal biscuits, as Barbara Roden pointed out.

I've noticed that words for foodstuffs seem to vary quite a lot, not just in
English, but in other languages too. As Barbara also pointed out in another
thread, in the US version of Harry Potter "pudding" got changed to
"dessert". In Japanese, though, the word "purin" (derived from English
"pudding", means "caramel cream" (the gunky sweet stuff people sometimes eat
for pudding). In turn, caramel cream in Spanish is called "flan". On my last
visit to the UK a Spanish lady and her daughter in the supermarket were
studying cheese flans with mystified expressions until I put them right!

--
John
http://rarebooksinjapan.com

Sandy Malcolm wrote:

I have memories of something that's chocolate on one side, with a bit of
marmalade underneath it, and the biscuit mix is much softer than usual

That's a Jaffa Cake,

Oh, yes! Thank you for reminding me!

which, despite its close resemblance to a biscuit, has been
officially designated a cake. I can't remember why this came about, but
there
was some kind of official debate (I can't believe it was a court case, but
who
knows?) which the makers of Jaffa Cakes won, based on their argument that
"biscuits are hard, and when they're stale they go soft, but cakes are
soft, and
when they're stale they go hard". The latter is exactly what happens with
Jaffa
Cakes, so a cake it is. Apparently.

Well, that's logical enough! What are those kind of chewy coconuty ones
called? I've been trying to remember all day!

--
John
http://rarebooksinjapan.com

Wilum h as reenacted this encounter from when he was in Ireland, in a
corner grocer:

"Gimme that can of pop please."
"Give you what?"
"A soft drink."
"A what?"
"That soda pop! Right there behind you."
"Oh, this? You mean a tin of mineral?"

When asking for a tin of mineral in London the same exchange could well
have ended,
"You mean a fizzy?"

-paghat the ratgirl

--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
See the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com/

Replace perfect with confuse.

"fiziwig" wrote in message
...
It took British genius to invent the English language, ...
and American genius to perfect it.

"John Yamamoto-Wilson" wrote in message ...
Sandy Malcolm wrote:

I have memories of something that's chocolate on one side, with a bit of
marmalade underneath it, and the biscuit mix is much softer than usual

That's a Jaffa Cake,

Oh, yes! Thank you for reminding me!

which, despite its close resemblance to a biscuit, has been
officially designated a cake. I can't remember why this came about, but
there
was some kind of official debate (I can't believe it was a court case, but
who
knows?) which the makers of Jaffa Cakes won, based on their argument that
"biscuits are hard, and when they're stale they go soft, but cakes are
soft, and
when they're stale they go hard". The latter is exactly what happens with
Jaffa
Cakes, so a cake it is. Apparently.

Well, that's logical enough! What are those kind of chewy coconuty ones
called? I've been trying to remember all day!

Macaroons?

Lindig