[WikiEN-l] "I should know this, I worked on the Wikipedia article..."

[WJhonson at aol.com]

In a message dated 8/30/2009 6:22:24 AM Pacific Daylight Time, 
carcharothwp at googlemail.com writes:


> We have those. I've heard Americans refer to "garage sales". We
> (Brits) have those sometimes, but more often we take stuff to a local
> charity shop, or a school's "jumble sale", or stick stuff in the boot
> (luggage compartment) of a car, drive with others to an empty field,
> and have what called a "car boot sale"! :-)

----------------------------

OK, a garage sale is typically where you sell your stuff from your own 
garage.  People just park on the street, walk to your house and buy your stuff.  
Sometimes we'll have a "neighborhood" garage sale, where several people 
will sell their junk from one person's garage.

A flea market must be like your "car boot sale", but the flea market's I've 
been to, aren't in empty fields, they are more organized and regular.  
"Jumble sale" that's a new one, I think we'd call that a "charity flea market".  
That is, you donate your stuff and some charity sells it.

I was just thinking the other day, "Is there a British-American Dictionary" 
?  That would be a dictionary that has all these various words and phrases 
and their translations into British English.  Often I'll come upon an 
article obviously written by a Brit and it will say something like "At the market, 
her trolley bumped into a right blinker and he copped her one..."

(I just made that up), and it makes little sense at all to an American, 
unless they had watched a lot of British tele.

W.J.