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newbie
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newbie
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Leaving out the article "the" seems to show familiarity or association as in to town, to church, to synagogue. By the same token, clinicians and medical staff often go to hospital and professor-types go to university.
In the city of Long Beach, local usage emphasizes the Long and not Beach like a tourist would. Local usage may be such that even if the coast line was once magnificent and long, it is now sadly a big storm drain.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Less so than Whanganui a Tara, no?
Indeed!
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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In NY, people in THE bronx, (always with an article) go down town, and every one in the other boro's (usually the long spelling in NY) goes to the city when coming into manhattan.
And like London, natives take the IRT, BMT, and IND subwaylines. These are designations from the original companies that built the subways. The companies went belly up more than 50 years ago, but "Real NY's" still use the designations. Out of towners call them red line, blue line. Sophisticated transplants have learn to refer only to the numbers and letters (take the A train, or take the number 7 line-).
NY maps indicate there is an Avenue of the Americas in NY, but no one calls it that, its 6th Avenue. the name was changed sometime before my birth --so immediately pre or post WWII. It was still 6th Avenue in the 30's, when the el (elevated railroad) was torn down, and sold as scrap metal to Japan. (local story is the 6th avenue el sunk the pacific fleet- the scrap from the el being used by Japan to make the bombs.)
I live in Queens-- so i have been denegrated as one of "the bridge and tunnel croud"
An other curiousity is, if you look at a map, you might think Queens is part of Long Island. but in NY, polictics is stronger than geography, so both Brooklyn and Queen are not considered part of Long Island. So I come from Queens, (named for queen Charlotte) not from Long Island. my early childhood was spent in The Bronx, so i still head downtown each morning to work, while most of my nieghbors go to the city.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Pity then the poor Kiwi, who is bombarded from all sides by cultures which have developed elsewhere.
While we are evolving/have evolved a distinctively New Zealand culture (better described using negative statements than positive), we are a former British colony with essentially British institutions adrift in a sea of American cultural icons, news and views.
My grandmother (and many of her contemporaries) always referred to Britain as "home". Most confusing to a child to whom Britain was a mysterious place on the other side of the world.
It was actually worse than that for us kids - we had New Zealand Chinese neighbours on one side of us and Dutch immigrants on the other. (New Zealand Chinese are very common in the part of NZ that I come from. They have been here for four generations or more - as long as most, if not all the current European immigrants).
The kids from the neighbourhood were colour and culture blind - we spoke bits of three languages, none of them well - and confused the hey out of our parents.
American culture appears to have taken root within a very short time of TV becoming available in the early 1960s, although I believe there was a major effort by the programmers to source lots of British shows. Our own were naive to the point of being extremely embarrassing to watch, a problem they sometimes still have.
Now we have more American input than from anywhere else, with the possible exception of shows from the West Island (you will know it as Australia).
Just as an aside, the thread on Cockney rhyming slang made me laugh. We have incorporated quite a bit of it into normal everyday English as spoken in NZ (known as "Zild").
People like me tend to rabbit on all day without ever wondering where the rabbit came from or why it's a verb!
Cheers
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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In reply to:
Leaving out the article "the" seems to show familiarity or association as in to town, to church, to synagogue. By the same token, clinicians and medical staff often go to hospital and professor-types go to university.
In my (Southern English) usage the difference seems to be that the indicates the institution rather than the place. Thus, the patient is in hospital, but the doctor's just left to go to the hospital. Students go to university to follow a course of study, but might go to the university to get a drink in the bar.
Bingley
Bingley
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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an addendum to Helen of Troy's post: Native Noo Yawkers take the train. Tourists take the subway (once they overcome their fears  )
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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MaxQ. We have a similar situation in Montréal. Montréal is an almond-shaped island in the St. Lawrence River. At this level, the river is narrow enough to permit bridge links to the land on both sides. Natives of the area refer to the surrounding land as either The North Shore or The South Shore though these descriptions are not to be found on any map. One can always spot an out-of-towner when he has no clue what you are saying when you say “we’re looking to buy a house on the North Shore” or something of the like.
To confuse non-natives further, The North Shore is not the land directly to the north of Montréal. It is the land north of Laval, an island north of Montréal in the river.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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>>While we are evolving/have evolved a distinctively New Zealand culture (better described using negative statements than positive)...
C K …what do you mean by this. It sounds awfully self-critical.
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Carpal Tunnel
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OP
Carpal Tunnel
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C K …what do you mean by this. It sounds awfully self-critical.
Sadly, I think Capital Kiwi is right on the money. Being self-critical is probably the outstanding defining mark of the evolving NZ identity. In the late 70s, a NZ comic challenged this attitude with a humorous ditty entitled "You don't know how lucky you are." He lost, and emigrated to Australia, where he has done spectacularly well.
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enthusiast
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enthusiast
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Completely off-thread, but I had to share my amusement at seeing these two threads juxtaposed:
Where do you live?
chad
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