In a message dated 8/30/2009 6:22:24 AM Pacific Daylight Time, carcharothwp@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"! :-)
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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.