According to the English, to all intents and purposes Manchester is a city in northwestern England, located 30 miles to the east of Liverpool, in the heart of the most densely populated area of England.
So when I quoted on my inventory of items to be left in a storage facility here, that it would contain various items of Manchester, the guy behind the counter looked at me very strangely.
Try looking for a definition of Manchester on the web that does not include the words Australia or New Zealand, and you'd understand why. Only antipodeans call sheets and towels Manchester. To the rest of the world, the word generally means the home of the Soccer - sorry, I mean football (sheesh!) - team, Manchester United.
In England, what we Aussies consider Manchester, they call soft goods. I've been looking for a reason why we call it Manchester, but I can't find one on the web at least. I guess it's because some Australian factory imported soft goods from Manchester and it's another one of these instances where the name got extrapolated from the product name to come to mean the product but I can't prove it. If anyone can elucidate me, please do!
I'll just have to be more diligent in my use of words in future.
2 comments:
Yeah, that's another one of those things you don't realise is a cultural difference until you crash blindly into it.
You should've seen the giggling that took place the first time I discovered that the motorised garden tool with the piece of nylon line whizzing about on the end isn't called a "whipper snipper" over here.
Mind you, a network nerd coming over here, connecting up a router might get some smirks...
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