Don’t Be a Stickybeak — and Other Home-Related Lingo From Abroad

My profession requires having a solid command of the English language. At least that’s something I like to tell people (or put at the beginning of an article about language, because it sounds interesting). But the truth is, it’s darn near impossible to keep up with the way people use any particular language.

The way we speak and the words we use are constantly changing and evolving. Humans have a tendency to make their own rules anyway, then create new rules that reverse the old rules. Like, did you know the original meaning of “awful” was “to inspire wonder”? Somewhere along the way, we decided to make it mean the opposite.

Home and design terms are no exception to the language madness. And in light of recently announcing Houzz sites in the U.K. and Australia, we thought it would be fitting to take a look at how everyday terms differ across oceans.

For example, when Americans travel to the U.K. or Australia, they might be confused about what floor they’re on. There the first floor is located on what Americans would call the second. And what we call the first floor, they call the ground floor.

So, if you’re ever in, say, London or Sydney, you actually have to ascend a flight of stairs to reach the first floor.

Author Jonathan Bernstein, who was born in Scotland and now lives in Los Angeles, wrote Knickers in a Twist: A Dictionary of British Slang about his experience trying to figure out why some U.K. words and phrases percolated across the Atlantic and some didn’t.

Few in America use “loo” when referring to the bathroom, for example. “When I came to America, I’d be talking to someone, and there’d be nothing but a blank look,” Bernstein says. “They didn’t understand, or I didn’t understand. ‘Restroom’ was one of those words that gave me years of trouble. A restroom to me was just a room upstairs for relaxing or something.”

Through Bernstein’s research, he found that a lot of U.K. lingo traveled with immigrants during the 1800s, who created a melting pot of cultures. “A lot of people just misheard stuff,” he says. “There was a lot of Jamaican patois, Yiddish — it was just an amalgamation of so many languages.”

Word origins aren’t always clear even in the original countries. In Bernstein’s native Glasgow, the word everyone used for bathroom when he was growing up was “cludgie”; he has no clue of its origins. “It’s just that Scottish thing of trying to make things as disgusting as possible,” he says.

Here are some other common terms — or uncommon, depending on where you live:

Toilet (U.S.)
Dunny (Australia)
Loo (U.K.)

I’d imagine that being an etymologist in Australia is one of the most difficult and frustrating jobs. The lingo there seems to favor brevity and slang over any sort of formal language.

“Dunny,” a slangy word used for a “toilet,” fits that description on both counts. Surprisingly, this is one of the few words whose history is somewhat known. According to Australian National University, “In cities and towns the pan-type dunny was emptied by the dunny man, who came round regularly with his dunny cart. ‘Dunny’ can now be used for any toilet. The word comes from British-dialect ‘dunnekin,’ meaning ‘dung-house’. First recorded 1933.”

Knock, knock. “Are you all done in the dunny, honey?”

Continue reading Don’t Be a Stickybeak — and Other Home-Related Lingo From Abroad

Don’t Be a Stickybeak — and Other Home-Related Lingo From Abroad