If someone said that I would think they were talking about a store called Kitty Corner and that they'd forgotten some words in that sentence
Kitty-corner, and corn is corn? Like that was my whole reaction to that. It means both the plant and the edible parts.
It's not damning with faint praise, the word has a distinct different meaning, closer to "somewhat". I'm not sure that damning with faint praise is much of a thing in the UK? I mean, I expect people do it, but I never heard the phrase until Seebs used it, and I wouldn't consider it a local linguistic feature. Especially since "not bad", "alright", and "quite good" frequently mean "pretty good".
Matesprit's family, and my mom's side of the family calls the spot they go up to for the weekends during the summer (and spring, and early fall if it hadn't started snowing) "the camp" or "the campgrounds". There aren't any tents; everyone's in houses or little trailers. (They also call a specific type of house "trailers" - the pre-fab kind that you can just drop on a plot of land and call it good, if you're not particularly fussy.) Usually everyone's got work or something that needs doing during the week, though, so everyone's making a point to get out and away from the house on the weekend. ...I think I once trapped one of those dudes in a clear peanut butter jar with some corn syrup and took it in to show-and-tell in first grade. And then let it out in a parking lot a few days later. In retrospect, I have no idea how I managed to do all that without getting stung. Up where I grew up (southern Ontario), "snowbirds" refers to a specific group of people who leave the country for the winter. Usually elderly folks who can't really manage the winters up here any more. "Grill" refers to putting something on a barbeque (or a barbeque-like surface) here in Canada too! I learned that it does not mean the same thing today, when I watched an episode of Great British Bake-off where the contestants were told to grill something that needed a slightly burnt caramel on top (and they weren't allowed to use blowtorches for it), and then I looked up from my sewing at the screen and got very confused to see everyone putting their dishes in the oven as opposed to on top of a grill pan or something.
That is the actual reason for snowbirds, yes. Older people who can't handle the harsh winter and have the disposable income to head south. In practice, it's a lot of old racists who desperately want to kill people with their cars and deprive the school system of money because their kids don't go here. (That said, most of the Canadians I've met have been pretty nice. New York, Michigan, New Jersey, and Wisconsin are the problem children.)
This meme is going around on plurk, it asks a number of questions like "what do you call fizzy lifting drinks" and "what do you call the shoes you wear in gym class" to figure out where (in the USA) you're likely from. My results:
I'm having Problems because there's no way to select more than one answer. ("It's a (traffic) circle and a roundabout," "Puma concolor is a puma, panther, cougar, and mountain lion"...) I've been clicking "other" on them mostly, because the answer is just 'whichever word gets out my mouth first' :T It did, somehow, manage to localize me in the right area... but judging by the 'distinctive answers' section, it's almost entirely based on one of the questions I managed to have a single answer for. So. Hooray for local slang? And by color, the map pretty much just says "prooobably not in the northern midwest".
and now the important questions: does anyone else refer to the act of doing donuts in a car as 'whipping shitties' (yes, seriously)
when you say doing donuts.... ...wait that's turning rapidly in circles doing wheelies you're not talking about fucking the donut
Ahh ok, that makes sense. It makes me laugh a little bc the MMO I play gave the characters terrible fake British accents (because in fantasy worlds everyone is always British right) the people writing the english scripts are still American iirc...so there are several instances of culture clash weirdness where they don't get things quite (hah!) right. (Thankfully they switched to a UK recording studio for the expansion. And part of the reason the original VA work as so bad is the very reason that strike is happening now. :( so I can hardly blame the actors themselves. But man.)
no man donuts or whipping shitties is where you alternate gas pedal and brake so that the car slaloms in a circle with a fixed point at the front of the car, the rear wheels dragging sideways and it leaves lots of smoke and tire marks I have no clue how to do it but it looks fun
Yeah, that's definitely doing donuts around here, nothing else afaik. also @BunjyWunjy your signature makes me think of a goldfish ineffectually nomming someone's finger.
fffffff thanks that's a great mental image! (the line is from the original Sim City, which we had in my computer class in grade school. at some point one of the other kids figured out if you typed '/joke' in the command line, it gave you... that. almost a coherent joke, but not quite. it made enough of an impression to stick with me for twenty years :I )
That's exactly what I was thinking! Hate that post tbqh. I'm not a fan of jokes where the punchline is "Haha look at these people who were so gullible!" But I digress... I've only heard donuts referred to as donuts though whipping shitties sounds like how my brother drives. Fast and reckless and scary as fuck. I've heard the phrase kitty corner before, but it sounds pretty old fashioned. I'd need to clarify that the speaker meant diagonally if I heard it in conversation.
From a quick Google search, "whipping shitties" seem to be a thing in some places, unless people who say that are collectively playing a prank.
Omg. This is exactly the experience I've had in South Florida. We're entering snowbird season now. I'm so glad I quit working at Whole Foods since last holiday season.
