Just recently I was in a conversation with a number of UK mainlanders and we had a debate over what “tories” meant, apparently disproportionately ordinarily it refers to a political party and it’s not usual to use it as short for “territories” as I’ve used it (according to how the debate ended, it was half and half between them). And once again I’m reminded of how people feel to look back at their usage of a word/phrase over the years and cringe.
More tragically, me and a friend were embarrassed once upon realizing everyone was confusing “encephalitis” with “hydrocephalus” when talking to someone about their kid with hydrocephalus. Awkward because encephalitis is caused by HIV.
Table might count for me here.
I grew up in America and “a bill was tabled” means that a bill was removed from consideration there… while as in Canada it means the precise opposite “a bill was tabled” means it was introduced for debate.
I don’t use the term often in common speech, but I was really confused reading political news when I first arrived.
So did you table your use of
tableor was it tabled and therefore, still on the table?Really?
In Canada to remove from consideration the term is “shelved”, just in case that’s different. Tables and shelves, what’s with these terms? (probably what happened with the physical paper it was written on.)
Verbing weirds language.
and languaging weirds verbs
We can also compoundwordly languageweird!
Yea, and the Cambridge dictionary backs me up here https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/tabled
US doesn’t make any sense to me. The table is where things are discussed. You bring it to the table.