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Thanks Helena and Tsuwm, I'm much happier now!

I think that the restaurant stuff is fairly similar, Hobart is a common brand name - I think especially for their steam oven. Although I used to do the accounts for a small cafe when I worked in an Arts Centre, we didn't need any new equipment while I was there, so I never had reason to look through the suppliers catalogues.

I was interested to see the word range used for a cooker. We would only call something like an AGA (yes, they cost £3,000 new plus the re-inforced floor, so not for everyone, except in Joanna Trollope books) a range, although they now make double width electric and gas cookers and call the ranges (I suspect because it sounds more up-market). My grandmother called a cooker a stove, so it always makes me think of something from the 1950s. There is a cooker company called Stoves which is doing quite well at the moment, making ranges. Apart from that, the ranges and stoves shown don't look too dissimilar.



#11278 12/01/00 10:35 PM
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>electric kettles (just now becoming popular in US)

This came as rather a shock to me as a young person, setting foot in a New York apartment for the first time. Arguably the most civilised place on the planet, yet how does one boil water? In a pan on the stove, very strange, I thought. How on earth does one make a cup of tea? Fortunately the lack of electric kettles soon dimmed in my memory. The thing I really remember .... was my bare foot encounter with the 4 inch roaches, en-route to the bathroom in the middle of the night. I loved the way they scuttled away as I turned on the light. "Ah - civilisation", I murmured to my crunchy but attentive audience as I calculated the cost bringing forward my return ticket to London by three months and twenty seven days.

In retrospect it was a good thing that I didn't, I may have met tsuwm battling his way through the diesel fumes in London!

Next instalment, the spiders of Queensland


#11279 12/02/00 03:20 AM
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In Québec we use only the word stove for what you call range/cooker.

The word cooker is only used in the description of a pot with an air-tight cover that quick-cooks food. It is called a pressure-cooker.

What is a HOB you speak of?


#11280 12/02/00 07:46 AM
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>What is a HOB you speak of?

Amazing isn't it. I think that we are entering the world of bread rolls and English as a local language. If someone talks about macroeconomic indicators, transcendental meditation or transubstantiation everyone knows what we’re talking about. The minute we get down to the gas or electric hotplate on the top of a stove, all our communication skills fail us!

The hob is the bit on top of the stove (or maybe recessed into the work-surface) that provides the heat for cooking.

The point about electric kettles is that when one is young, one assumes that everywhere is a bit the same. Travelling provides insight into life at home. It had never occurred to me that an electric kettle was a very British item, probably to do the fact that we have traditionally drunk more tea than coffee.

On the other hand … American fridges … wow!



#11281 12/02/00 09:00 PM
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Don't laugh. French Canadians call an electric kettle a duck (un canard). I assume it is because of the bill-like pouring spout.


#11282 12/02/00 11:21 PM
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What did you say in the yellow print?
My old eyes just turn it into a blur and it looks like a yellow line! Anyone else have trouble with yellow print? wow


#11283 12/02/00 11:25 PM
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Sorry - old joke - just highlight it and you'll see, it's a bit like having invisible ink but I'll move on, I think.


#11284 12/03/00 12:08 PM
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belMarduk wrote: Don't laugh. French Canadians call an electric kettle a duck (un canard). I assume it is because of the bill-like pouring spout.

Here in NZ, we refer to cookers, stoves, ranges interchangeably. Hobs usually referred to the part of an open fireplace where you could put the kettle to boil. On electric ranges, we call the hot plate an "element", although old geezers may still use "hob". With gas cookers, I usually hear "putting something on the gas". But then we don't refer to petrol as gas (much) except when using American slang such as "step on the gas". It's no wonder English is such a hard language for foreigners to speak colloquially!





The idiot also known as Capfka ...
#11285 12/03/00 02:59 PM
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Never mind the colloquial ... just plain old pronunciation can do you in. "Did you eat" can become "jeweet" or even worse plain "jeet?".
In Hawaii you are likely to be asked "Howzit?"
In Northern New England there's an "insider" greeting :
"Do you think they'll have it?" The imagination displayed by the answer is critical! My favorite is : "Don't know but they just went down the road with the rope." Leaves room for even more speculation. wow.



#11286 12/03/00 06:15 PM
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>old geezers may still use "hob"

I'm in good company then!

(Actually I think hob came back into use when they needed to find a word for the bit built into the work surface that contained the gas burners and electric elements, when they separated the cooker(stove) out and built the oven and grill(broiler) into the wall units, does that make sense to anyone except me - I doubt it)


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