Different Meanings for Words

[RainhaDoTexugo]

This is really fascinating to me.  Here, just about anything that you'd call X Day is a holiday.  St. Patricks Day, Mothers Day, Father's Day, Valentine's Day, Columbus Day, Labor Day, Independence Day, etc.  Not that Day is a requirement - you wouldn't say Halloween Day or New Years Eve Day   They're still holidays here, even if you have to work and things don't shut down.  Not everybody actually celebrates them, and there have been times when I've made plans to get something done only to arrive at Government Office and find it closed for some holiday I totally forgot about.  They still all fit under the Holiday umbrella, though.  I guess Americans just like their holidays!

[P-p-p-penguin]

Easter isn't anywhere near the level of Christmas, obviously, but we still do have bank holidays for it and it is celebrated on a larger scale than Halloween, for example, which was why I included it.

Oh I wasn't meaning to contradict you!  Just musing!  I get three weeks off uni for Easter, but I won't do a single thing to celebrate it, neither will most of my fellow students, its a bit of a curiosity in the calendar.

Not at all, just explaining why I included it because I didn't make it clear - I said this was really hard to explain!

It's one of those inbetween-y ones.  I actually do know non-religious people who celebrate it but more in the sense that they'll have people over for lunch/dinner.  Oh, and my granny still buys me an Easter egg every year!

[Snooks]

You're more likely to say "What did you do over Christmas/Easter/the bank holiday?" to someone then you'd say "Oh on Christmas Eve/the 30th/Sunday we went to my parents' for dinner".  We just don't talk about the holidays as a season as such.  I'm all for another bank holiday between the August one and Christmas, that's too long without a free day off.

[Brentwood]

You're more likely to say "What did you do over Christmas/Easter/the bank holiday?" to someone then you'd say "Oh on Christmas Eve/the 30th/Sunday we went to my parents' for dinner".  We just don't talk about the holidays as a season as such.  I'm all for another bank holiday between the August one and Christmas, that's too long without a free day off.

That's what we often do too ("What are your plans for Christmas Eve?"), but in generic terms, Christmas is a holiday. Easter is a holiday. It's defines the occasion, so to speak. My birthday is not a holiday. Christmas is a holiday.

[Slartibartfast]

Holidays can be regional in the US, too.  Where I grew up (Wisconsin), we got Good Friday and "Easter Monday" (the day after Easter) off of school, but never had Martin Luther King day off.  Where I live now (Alabama), Martin Luther King day is a much bigger deal, and people would look at you like you had two heads if you tried to insist your employees/students came in on that day.  Nobody here has heard of Easter Monday, though.  (We also had "St. Nick's Day" on December 6th in Wisconsin - apparently a German Catholic tradition? - as a separate thing from Christmas.  St. Nick came and brought a small present, just like Santa Claus does.)  On the other side of the coin, nobody in my hometown has heard of "watch night."

[Lysistrata]

Not a different meaning per se, but something I've wondered about and never thought to bring up until now:

Why do we (in the US) and folks in the UK (may be more widespread, I don't know) pronounce the artist Vincent van Gogh's last name differently? In the US we say "van go" but on British shows I've heard it pronounced more like "van gock." Why? Is one more correct than the other?

[Ferrets]

Not a different meaning per se, but something I've wondered about and never thought to bring up until now:

Why do we (in the US) and folks in the UK (may be more widespread, I don't know) pronounce the artist Vincent van Gogh's last name differently? In the US we say "van go" but on British shows I've heard it pronounced more like "van gock." Why? Is one more correct than the other?

QI to the rescue!

[marcel]

Not a different meaning per se, but something I've wondered about and never thought to bring up until now:

Why do we (in the US) and folks in the UK (may be more widespread, I don't know) pronounce the artist Vincent van Gogh's last name differently? In the US we say "van go" but on British shows I've heard it pronounced more like "van gock." Why? Is one more correct than the other?

Because the correct pronounciation is impossible for non-Dutch people, you are all just improvising. I do think that Van Gock comes slightly closer to the correct way then Van Go.

By the way, you all mispronounce van as well. (The 'a' is pronounced more like the 'a' in bath)

[kherbert05]

Holidays can be regional in the US, too.  Where I grew up (Wisconsin), we got Good Friday and "Easter Monday" (the day after Easter) off of school, but never had Martin Luther King day off.  Where I live now (Alabama), Martin Luther King day is a much bigger deal, and people would look at you like you had two heads if you tried to insist your employees/students came in on that day.  Nobody here has heard of Easter Monday, though.  (We also had "St. Nick's Day" on December 6th in Wisconsin - apparently a German Catholic tradition? - as a separate thing from Christmas.  St. Nick came and brought a small present, just like Santa Claus does.)  On the other side of the coin, nobody in my hometown has heard of "watch night."

We  have an odd twist on the Easter Monday thing here in Texas. When Easter is early in the year we get it off. When it is later in April it often falls the day before the state test, and we don't get it off. (High absenteeism after long weekends, wanting the kids back in their routines before giving the test)

In my district the Good Friday Day used to be a bad weather make up day. Well we had several years with bad weather - like huricane evacuations were the state decided making up the days was to much trouble and said we didn't.

Then last year we had an ice storm. They let school out early and called the next day off as a precaution. I remember teachers being more excited than the kids about their extra day off. I made a bet right then with coach that there would be a firestorm when we had to make it up.

I won.

The screams of religious persecution ticked me off to no end. What especially ticked me off was some of the people admitted that they did not normally attend services and some didn't even have services on Good Friday! But we always have it off - but it is a religious holiday. They never made us make up a day before. When asked to back them up I said - you knew the rules when you signed your contract so be quiet. (The fact on my campus one of the biggest belly achers was ugly about a Jewish teacher taking off her Holy Days, and made bigoted remarks about schools accommodating other religious fasting (No problem with that horrible fish like stuff they serve Fridays during Lent) meant that as it heated up, I adapted the coke rule to lunch. I stayed in my room to eat to avoid telling the bigot exactly what I thought of her.

[Brentwood]

Not a different meaning per se, but something I've wondered about and never thought to bring up until now:

Why do we (in the US) and folks in the UK (may be more widespread, I don't know) pronounce the artist Vincent van Gogh's last name differently? In the US we say "van go" but on British shows I've heard it pronounced more like "van gock." Why? Is one more correct than the other?

Because the correct pronounciation is impossible for non-Dutch people, you are all just improvising. I do think that Van Gock comes slightly closer to the correct way then Van Go.

By the way, you all mispronounce van as well. (The 'a' is pronounced more like the 'a' in bath)

I pronounce the "a" in van the same as I do for bath.

[oz diva]

Holidays. We always get Good Friday and Easter Monday, some workplaces get Easter Tuesday also. We get Christmas Day and Boxing Day (26 December). A local favourite, is Melbourne Cup Day, it's the biggest horse race in the nation, it happens on the first Tuesday of November and it's a public holiday. Who else gets a public holiday to watch a horse race? I love Australia.

[Slartibartfast]

Holidays. We always get Good Friday and Easter Monday, some workplaces get Easter Tuesday also. We get Christmas Day and Boxing Day (26 December). A local favourite, is Melbourne Cup Day, it's the biggest horse race in the nation, it happens on the first Tuesday of November and it's a public holiday. Who else gets a public holiday to watch a horse race? I love Australia.

Not horse racing, but the first day of deer season was always a "snow makeup day" even though it rarely snowed enough by then to have cancelled school.  I think mostly it was because so many teachers called in sick 

[Bluenomi]

Holidays. We always get Good Friday and Easter Monday, some workplaces get Easter Tuesday also. We get Christmas Day and Boxing Day (26 December). A local favourite, is Melbourne Cup Day, it's the biggest horse race in the nation, it happens on the first Tuesday of November and it's a public holiday. Who else gets a public holiday to watch a horse race? I love Australia.

Melbourne cup is only a public holiday in Victoria, we don't get it  Well we did for a few years but we don't anymore. But I can't complain really, we get the most public holidays in the ACT of any place in Oz 

[Ereine]

Finnish has a word for "USian", yhdysvaltalainen (the name of the country is Amerikan yhdysvallat or Yhdysvallat) but it's a bit formal, in every day speech it's usually amerikkalainen (or even jenkki, Yankee). That only refers to people from USA usually. The country is usually USA, even though it's not Finnish, it's pronounced as a word instead of an abbreviation (sort of like oo-sa). You can even say usalainen.

Oh, merciful heavens, don't call us yankees!

Don't worry, I won't Jenkki is rather neutral here and it's used to refer to all sorts of things that are thought American, often in a sort of stereotypical 1950s rock'n'roll way that probably has nothing to do with real America. So there's Jenkki chewing gum, jenkki beds (it has two mattresses on top of each other), jenkki hair (a crew cut), jenkki fridge (it has a small freezer on top of the fridge while more often fridge freezer combinations have the freezer on the bottom and it's as large as the fridge), jenkki auto (not just any American car but this sort) and so on. Jenkki used for people can be derogative (it's often used in relation to wars and things like that) but it's not used that much, at least in person as most people have very little to do with actual Americans (our biggest group of tourists is Russians).

We have a word for holidays, pyhät or pyhäpäivät or juhlapyhät, literally holy days, even when they're not religious (but most of the official holidays are, apart from Independence Day and May Day) but I can't really imagine using that word to say that I like to get together with my family over the holidays. Many people spend the holidays with their families and it's expected but I wonder if the difference is that it doesn't require much effort so there isn't really a concept for that. I live quite far from my mother but it's still only three or four hours by train so getting there for Christmas is rather commonplace. Many people will travel longer distances and being with your family is seen as important but I guess it's not something people will often say (but if you want you can say "Vietän juhlapyhät mielelläni perheeni parissa."). I also wonder if holidays seem to be more important to Americans because you have less vacation time? Or at least that's my impression, in Finland it's common to have six weeks of paid vacation time a year.

I'm sorry to bring my language to a discussion about differences in English but I can't seem to stay away.

[RainhaDoTexugo]

Not a different meaning per se, but something I've wondered about and never thought to bring up until now:

Why do we (in the US) and folks in the UK (may be more widespread, I don't know) pronounce the artist Vincent van Gogh's last name differently? In the US we say "van go" but on British shows I've heard it pronounced more like "van gock." Why? Is one more correct than the other?

Because the correct pronounciation is impossible for non-Dutch people, you are all just improvising. I do think that Van Gock comes slightly closer to the correct way then Van Go.

By the way, you all mispronounce van as well. (The 'a' is pronounced more like the 'a' in bath)

I pronounce the "a" in van the same as I do for bath.

As do I.  Marcel must be thinking of the British pronunciation of Bath, or of Van.