h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

zed is british english. zee is us english. people in countries where british english is spoken started using zee because of the sesame street alphabet song sung to the tune of twinkle twinkle little star (itself a mozart variation).

you can pretty much date a person by their use of zee and when sesame street first aired in their country.

i have no idea why u.s. americans say zee. a product of german migration perhaps?

it's an apartment on one floor. no upstairs or downstairs. hence: flat.

Ah. Otherwise you call it an apartment then?

i no longer live in england so can't comment on what they are called there today.

the difference between a flat and an apartment is washing on the balcony or not.

I would say (perhaps quite wrongly!) that an apartment is something a highly-paid businessman calls his very expensive flat because he wants to differentiate it from the small, rubbish ones inhabited by the less fortunate.

What *does* confuse me is the first/ground floor malarkey. In the US, the first floor is the UK ground floor, ie. the floor in contact with the ground. So the US second floor is the UK first floor . What makes it worse is that in fact people in the UK say 'first floor' when they mean 'ground floor', which skews all the floor numbers. So I always confirm which floor people actually *mean*.

In the U.K. there can be "a block of flats" and yet we don't refernce street layout as 'blocks' as the same way Amercans may.

Plus 'flats' can also mean flat shoes. Pumps in U.K. shoe terms are different to the American too.

I'd have thought our apparments is closer to the American condominium?

<< What *does* confuse me is the first/ground floor malarkey >>

It gets worse... in the building where i work, the basement is called floor 1. the proper ground floor is 2, and so on. however, the library on campus has a sub-basement, basement, ground floor, 2nd floor, etc. (as labeled in the lift/elevator)

I love to say that my favourite american band is zed zed top. makes people crazy.

The biggest difference i notice, between american and canadian english, is the food. They say soda, we say pop. Candy bar, chocolate bar. Fries, chips.
dey sum crazy.

and then there's mezzanines

i like mezzanines with ketchup.

I prefer tomato sauce.

a nice bearnaise is good too.

You say tomayto, I say tomahto

Deb

>> Why are apartments called "Flats" in Britain? <<

Because of the blitz I think.
Everybody's house got knocked flat.

~jwf~

Wasn't there once a sketch where (I think) Angus Deayton and Ruby Wax were playing the male and female leads in a musical, and were seriously confused by the lyrics of "Let's call the whole thing off"?

It went something like:

DEAYTON (V plummy and English) Look, this song. What's it about? (He recites "I say "tomato" and you say "tomato". Tomato, tomato, tomato, tomato, let's call the whole thing off". it doesn't make sense." (He pronounces the word as British English "Tomato" throughout)

WAX (V. Bronx American) Same here! (she recites) "I say "potato" and you say "potato". Potato, potato, potato, potato, let's call the whole thing off". I mean, we're both calling it a potato, so where's the godamn problem?" She pronounces the word as American English "Potahto" throughout)

THE PRODUCER:- Oh, Christ.... (puts head in hands)

<<
>> Why are apartments called "Flats" in Britain? <<
Because of the blitz I think.
Everybody's house got knocked flat.
>>


That's true.
My grand-dad was bombed out during the blitz, and a lot of people in my gran's neighbourhood were, too.

Called 'Flats' here too as well as Apartments and we have 'Blocks of flats' and 'Apartment blocks'.

Ah, and one more to the mix is 'Unit' or Units' and Realtor types will speak of a 'Unit development' or a 'Unit complex' in which can be found, 'Apartments' for the well heeled and below those, ordinary 'Units' or 'Flats' for the less well off.

Quite often units will be known as 'Old age units' or 'Retirement units', they are never called 'retirement flats' or 'retirement apartments'.
Unit development can take the form of a single story lateral development or it can take the huge skyscraper approach like they do on the Gold Coast region of S.E.Q. particularly at Surfers Paradise.
I think these would be known as Condo's by Americans and tall, really tall, things by UK types as they tried to work out whether they are tall blocks of flats or gigantic apartment blocks or just plain old skyscrapers.

keith. in oz, units are ground level single story buildings that are part of a strata title. hence home 'unit'. if they are part of a multi level building they are always called apartments if built recently. flats almost exclusively describes small rental properties that are part of multi level buildings.

condominium is the american version of strata title and refers to the title not the building itself, which may or may not be an apartment. as is the case in oz.

Here's one. In America:

One=1
Ten=10
Hundred=100
Thousand=1,000
Million=1,000,000
Billion=1,000,000,000
Trillion=1,000,000,000,000


And so on. (The truth is that I just don't know the numbers after trillion. ) Now, according to my brother, the names for these numbers work out differently in Britain.

They might be ground floor where you are but not where I live.
They are known as units, blocks of units and high rise units and as you say apartments but not exclusively so.

Various friends of mine own units on the Gold Coast and they're all high rise units as far as they're concerned. I've worked on a few and they were always known as units or apartments.