I'm getting caught up from the last few weeks. Apologies for not "liking" every post; I was busy enough quoting them.
Reminder: I'm an American.
Pam Ayres has a poem called
Don't Start.
And They Might Be Giants has the song "Don't Let's Start", which means "don't start or you'll get me started."
*'Uppity' isn't a word much used in British English. It has racist connotations in American usage. As Techy has American colleagues I've advised him to never, ever speak it to them.
Sad to say, it is increasing in the uk, usually by the "well I don't mean it like that so it's totally fine, people-of-THAT-type are always looking for trouble and getting above themselves" brigade.
I think if a word has racist or similar overtones in a particular culture - even if they're part of the word's origin - the word can be used by others more safely. Uppity is sometimes used amongst African Americans both with and without racial context. (Or so I have been led to believe by televised dramas.)
And soda up here is 'pop' down south.
Apparently (according to some stand-up comics) soda pop is called "coke" in parts of the South, regardless of flavor or manufacturer.
Custard can be chocolate flavoured, or strawberry flavoured. These days, anyway. Horrible stuff.
But I believe vanilla is still an ingredient, as it is in many foods available in different flavors - which is part of the reason vanilla is a metaphor for plain.
Beats me!
The answer from a woman in a B. Kliban cartoon when asked "Why do you hang around with that sadist?"
Is it a generational thing that rectangles aren't called oblongs any more?
As supported by the information provided by others above, to me oblong was always an adjective indicating something that is considerably longer in one dimension than the other(s). If someone asked me to draw a shape that was "an oblong" - i.e. oblong as a noun - I'd draw something like a longish rectangle with semicircles instead of straight lines along the shorter dimension.
In my childhood a rectangle was always called a rectangle - or, inaccurately, a square.
Just yesterday I was in a pizzeria whose menu board said their "square" pizzas were 12 by 17 inches. It took a lot of strength to keep myself from correcting them.
A square or parallelogram standing on one corner is often called a diamond.
I would only consider a
rhombus to be a diamond: if you draw straight lines connecting opposite corners, they meet at right angles. This doesn't apply to most parallelograms. The diamond/rhombus shape is sometimes called a lozenge, a word also used to describe a dissolving type of pill that's usually in the shape of - an oblong.
Paradoxically, there's a type of pentagon I'd call a diamond: a rhombus on its corner with a triangular bit cut off the top, so it looks like a typical engagement ring diamond seen from the side. Think of the modern version of the Superman symbol.
