From: bf455@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Bonita Kale)
Subject: Re: ENGLISH AS SHE IS SPOKE
Organization: Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, (USA)
Date: Mon, 13 Apr 92 12:02:30 GMT




In a previous article, DAB16@psuvm.psu.edu () says:

>In article <1992Apr12.111650.3877@usenet.ins.cwru.edu>,
>bf455@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Bonita Kale) says:
>>> (citing Francis Muir citing her)
>>>       Sneakers were tennis shoes.  Or sometime just tennis, as in
>>>       "I forgot my tennis and couldn't play in gym."  Stubbornly,
>>>       I cling to my sneakers.
>>>(Francis' reply:)
>>>Are you sure they were not "tennies"? Calling a tennis shoe a "tennis"
>>>sounds more like the Franglais one heard on the Cote d'Azur.
>
>Francis is (of course) right, although it's pronunciation that's the issue.
>"Tennies" is what you call 'em.  You write 'em "Tennis Shoes."  I suppose
>the key is that whatever spelling one chooses has got to make the last
>syllable sound like "-eez"; the Germans call this kind of distinction between
>spoken and written language either "Mundart" [the mouth's manner] or
>"Umgangssprache" [going-around talk].  I hereby nominate Schlepptalk as
>an English (American) language equivalent.  And furthermore, before the
>proliferation of bourgeois sports, we grew up calling them "gym shoes."
>Now I suppose they'd have to be "Fitness Club Foot Apparel."

Well, my next-door neighbor and her extended family, and, I believe, a lot
of other people I dealt with when my children were of nursery-school age,
called them "tennis", pronounced "ten-iss".  Plural or singular, like
sheep.   You can call it Cleveland dialect or Cleveland error; I don't care
which.  But it interested me, so I asked, and that's what they called them,
all right.

We called them gym shoes when I was a kid, but only when referring
specifically to the shoes as required for physical educations class
("gym").  The -kind- of shoe required for gym was sneakers (in New York).

(Sorry, the washer went into spin cycle here and I lost a line.)
>between British and American usage have got to be the names for what
>people wear to cover their legs and what they erase stray pencil marks
>with.  Brits wear "trousers" and erase with "rubbers," while Americans
>wear "pants" and erase with "erasers."  The fun comes because Brits also
>wear pants (at least the women), but under their trousers, and Americans
>(men) can wear rubbers, usually with their pants off.  A poor young girl,
>an Austrian exchange student who had learned British usage, caused quite a
>stir when she asked a boy in the high school library if he had a "rubber"
>she could borrow.  Young Americans call what the British term "pants,"
>"underpants,"  making it ambiguous whether the "under" is prepositional or
>adjectival.  As people mature they call them "underwear" or "undies," not
>"undis" (cf. "tennies"/"tennis").                               ^^
>

"Rubbers" is a nuisance, since there really is no other word for what you
put on over your shoes, unless you want to get into "rubber overshoes" and
sound weird.  And yet the word has taken on a distinct sexual tinge.  And
"undies" is cutsie, almost as bad as "panties".

Which reminds me of a question I had regarding British usage.  C.S. Lewis
(d. 1963, so this was a while back) had a guest who asked to use the
"bathroom".  He showed him to the room with the bathtub in it, as a lesson
not to use American euphemisms.  I'm not sure what he wanted him to call
the room with the toilet in it, but I had the impression it was "lavatory",
which in the U.S., at least, is one of the most prissy, school-marmish
euphemisms you would ever wish to hear, while "bathroom" is reasonably blunt and
direct.   (Back in the sixties, I shocked a teen-aged library page by asking
him to check the bathrooms.  He thought I should have said "rest rooms".)

So what is the straightforward, non-vulgar usage in Great Britain? 

Some plumbing supply houses call the bathroom sink the lavatory, I believe,
but otherwise, the word is confined to school teachers who can't bear to
let the little ones say "bathroom".  But I think I've heard that the
British use the word for what we (equally foolishly) call the toilet. 


Bonita Kale