Thank you

[ailbhe]

to kightp for her potato curry recipe, which Rob has grown so friendly with that he can whip up a double-sized batch of a variant of it without pre-planning when we're too tired to cook during the week. We've had two or three meals of it and there's a container in the freezer for next time we're knackered.

And we're eating it with real bread and for dessert we're having preserved fruit - I have apricots and the others have peaches, because the apricots aren't sweet enough for them.

Linnea has picked up the habit of saying "pudding" to mean the non-savoury course at the end of the meal. I find this irritating because neither Rob nor I say it; we use "pudding" to mean a type of food. We say "dessert" (well, sometimes I might say "afters," but usually "dessert," and I'd rather not examine the complicated class issues which go into my saying "afters.") and I have a feeling I know where she picked the new word up from and I'm not happy about her learning language usage from people who say "silly" for "naughty." I happen to like silly.

Of course, it could be from somewhere else entirely, in which case I can stop worrying.

But why stop now?

Comments

[kightp.livejournal.com]

So glad the potato curry is making you all happy. It's so very tasty and filling and *good* for you, and it makes the *best* leftovers. (-:

[ailbhe]

We had to take out some of the heat, for babies, but everyone loves it, and it goes really well as heavy soup with real bread. It will take all sorts of abuse, in fact.

[helenprev.livejournal.com]

We as a family now call afters 'nelse', fairly often, because when Freya was little we used to say 'shall we have something else?' when it was time to have the sweet part of the meal. After a while of this, she would finish her main course and shout 'nelse! nelse!'

I do call it pudding, and am not ashamed of that, but I am ashamed to say that I say 'that was a silly thing to do, wasn't it?' far too often, and reading your post has made me reconsider that word. I don't much like the word naughty either though... must think on that one!

[rmc28]

I got all angsty at Christmas about the family saying "Good boy!" to my 15-month-old son for doing what they wanted, and pushed hard for "Well done!" or "thank you!" or "that's it!" The point being, was he therefore a "bad boy!" when he didn't manage to jump through their hoops, or didn't want to play any more?

I feel like chanting "the behaviour, not the person, the behaviour, not the person" some days.

I got told I probably think about this sort of thing too much (and that's a whole other rant), but they did at least try.

[ailbhe]

I say "good girl" but not "bad girl." I'm not sure how often I say "good girl," compared to "well done" or "wasn't that great," or "how strong!" or whatever. I think it's mainly in the tone.

For me and my family. Other families' tones can and do vary; I've heard "good girl" used to mean "and not like the bad girl over there to whom I am passive-aggressively comparing you."

[ailbhe]

I think I mostly say "That wasn't a good thing to do," but I do use the word "naughty" because it took so much effort to introduce it into my vocabulary at all! I ought to be saying "bold."

"Pudding" would be fine if it came from a source I was more comfortable with, but I suspect it comes from a source which actually believes that people who do/don't say "pudding" are/represent, er, something or other. Us/them, serviette/napkin, pardon/excuse me. Using the words in your own idiolect or dialect is fine, whether or not my daughter picks them up and adopts them as her own; telling my daughter that the words in her parents' idiolect/dialect are wrong, not so hot.

[tiggsybabes.livejournal.com]

I say pudding. I also rebel & call the midday meal lunch, when we're living in Yorkshire & everyone else calls in dinner.

[k425.livejournal.com]

Poor YoungBloke is going to grow up bi-dialectal - he has dinner and tea at nursery and lunch and dinner at home!

If we have anything after a meal, it's pudding - although YoungBloke is convinced that pudding actually means Eton mess and is always disappointed when it turns out to be something else.

I no longer have any idea which words are supposed to be which "class" and use interchangeable napkin/serviette, pudding/dessert/afters/sweet, sofa/settee...

[ailbhe]

I'm pretty sure that serviette is posh if you're middle class and French if you're upper class, in England. So posh middle-class people would say napkin.

Calling dessert pudding, to me, is a bit like calling breakfast "porridge" when actually you could be having bacon and eggs or toast or cocoa pops or cornflakes. It's not *used* in Ireland, as far as I'm aware.

I grew up saying "afters" quite cheerfully but now suspect it was a snobbish joke on my dad's part, like Stephen Fry greeting his friends with "Awrigh'" or similar. "Sweet" makes a lot of sense to me except for the potential for confusion when I was little, but that's because it was, again, a word only seen on English telly.

[radegund.livejournal.com]

I think my maternal grandmother (and, by extension, her family) may use "pudding" as well as "dessert".

(She also has a drawing-room and a linen press (not a hot press), eats lunch and dinner, using napkins, and sits on a sofa. I've inherited all this vocabulary except "drawing-room" - my family has a living-room. Niall grew up with "couch", so at home we use that interchangeably with "sofa". I'm not sure I've ever said "settee". To me, a "lounge" is part of a pub.)

[ailbhe]

I grew up with a drawing room, a sitting room, a dining room, a kitchen, and a playroom as separate concepts. A living room meant a room used for dining and sitting. A parlour was a sitting room kept for "best." The drawing room was also kept for best, but in a different way, somehow. Gosh this is hard to articulate.

We said sofa and our posher next door neighbours said couch; I don't know anyone who said settee. I knew people who called their sitting rooms lounges but it was very strange.

Thanks to peppercorns, we have a loaf of wholemeal, oat and poppyseed bread rising.

[tiggsybabes.livejournal.com]

Mine both have Yorkshire accents. I consider myself to have no accent, but I have a southern one where I pronounce everything clearly I guess. It makes me stand out locally as "posh" but I'm used to that now. The optician when I took Kate 2 weeks ago asked if we had a pony! I was a bit taken aback & said we had a cat. Andy pointed out that he assumed I was posh & that we must be rich as I wasn't working. If only ... Kate had no idea that you could own ponies up until that point.

I say "lounge", but my ex Upper Class MIL used "drawing room" It always cracked me up as their lounge was very small.

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

_Everybody_ has an accent. It just depends on where from, and what other factors might have influenced it.

[tiggsybabes.livejournal.com]

That's what I meant by saying that I consider myself not to have one, as my accent is normal to where I was brought up, so was the same as everyone else.

[clare-s.livejournal.com]

Yes the bi-dialectal thing is going on here too especially when it's all coming from one person. My defense is that growing up you had a packed lunch or school dinner at dinner time, which was signalled by the lunch bell. I use all the terms but basically dinner is the main meal of the day and that leaves lunch or tea.

[ex-serenejo.livejournal.com]

Got a pointer to the recipe?

[ailbhe]

http://kightp.livejournal.com/607316.html

It took a little looking, but I found it. Nomnomnom.

[sam-t.livejournal.com]

Thanks - that looks really useful!

I say 'pudding' to mean both 'the non-savoury course' and a subset of the dishes you might serve for it, according to context, but I don't think that 'silly' means the same as 'naughty'.