Mountain Goat wrote:
Pronounce.
Pronounced.
Pronounciation.
All the proper spellinbs I was taught as I live in Britain.
There are a few differences in grammar and spelling etc. Also a few words with totally different meanings and a few totally diffeeent words to describe the same thing.
Someone I know was banned from a USA Christian site when she went to describe the Welsh food called "fa***t" which here is a beautiful ball of meat which tastes lovely. Unfortunately it means something different over there? We also get rissoles in Sales which are beautiful, but they are only to be found in the South part of Wales.
I have to laugh. My niece when she was younger was up here and she had used my mums computer to log on so she could do some sort of internet spelling homework or something along those lines. She was only six. She said to my mum "Nanna. What is this?" The screen picture showed whag looked like a pirates treasure chest, and there was a blank that she aas supposed to fill in with the word for it, so my Mum typed in "Chest"... only to find that her grandchild became banned from her site!
I noticed that you have a question mark after the sentence "unfortunately it means something different over there?".
So I take it that that is a question. The answer is yes ...you're darned right... it means something different over here in the states!
In the US a 'fag", or a "fa***t" is a "male homosexual".
The National Lampoon humor magazine would reprint strange unintensionally funny advertisments from other publications. Decades ago I saw something they reprinted for laughs that was an ad in a women's magazine that said "fa***ts! What a saucy idea!". Riotously funny to Americans. I knew they were referring some kind of food recipe. But you finally solved the mystery for me. The mystery of what that other meaning of "fa***t" was. Its a welsh dish. Sounds yummy. Too bad its Welsh name has such a derogatory sexual connotation in the US.
The
original meaning of "fa***t" was simply "a bundle for sticks that you gathered to use as kindling".
"Fag" in the UK now has the slang meaning of "cigarette" (but it does not mean "homosexual") . And its easy to see how that probably evolved from the original meaning of "fa***t" (a cigarette is a stick you put in your mouth to set on fire- so it is a form of kindling or firewood). And a bundle for meat in a dish could also be likened to a bundling of sticks. So that meaning of fa***t also makes semantic evolutionary sense.
But how "fag" and "fa***t" came to mean homosexual in American English is not obvious to me.
Why they would censor "chest" I don't know.