The US also has an informal color coding or at least I don't believe there is regulation for it. Red for whole milk, blue for 2%, green for 1%. Most brands adhere to this standard. Interesting...
The US also has an informal color coding or at least I don't believe there is regulation for it. Red for whole milk, blue for 2%, green for 1%. Most brands adhere to this standard. Interesting that the colors are opposite from the UK.
Me: linguistic prescriptivism is so silly! Words are a tool to communicate with, and any "rules" are really just arbitrary conventions to help smooth that along. Also, regional differences often...
Me: linguistic prescriptivism is so silly! Words are a tool to communicate with, and any "rules" are really just arbitrary conventions to help smooth that along. Also, regional differences often point to fascinating historical forks in the road when you trace them back, there's no justification in saying one region's approach is better than any other...
Also me: "skim milk" and "whip cream" are instructions, goddammit! The product you get at the end is milk that has been skimmed, or cream that has been whipped. Now, look at that painted house, next to the paved road, with the landscaped garden, and tell me what you think we should call milk that has been skimmed?
Based on iced tea, iced coffee, and icing an injury, to "ice" something is to add ice to it, not to freeze it, so I'd say icecream is still distinct from iced cream.
Based on iced tea, iced coffee, and icing an injury, to "ice" something is to add ice to it, not to freeze it, so I'd say icecream is still distinct from iced cream.
The term for "ice cream" was originally "iced cream," though. The term first appeared in writing that way in the 1680s, and the variant "ice cream" did not appear until the 1740s. In English and...
The term for "ice cream" was originally "iced cream," though. The term first appeared in writing that way in the 1680s, and the variant "ice cream" did not appear until the 1740s. In English and many other languages, it's common for compound words to lack usual inflectional marking on their constituents, and it's also very common for frequently-used set noun phrases like this to become compounds over time. As a result, the superfluous past participle ending is dropped, as has happened with "iced cream," "skimmed milk," and "popped corn." This is a completely normal process that happens as part of language change, and it will continue to happen to new compounds over time no matter how many whiny prescriptivists complain about it.
I'd argue this has even happened (or at least begun to happen) to "iced coffee" in speech. Listen closely the next time someone ahead of you in line orders one -- especially if it's a teenage girl (as they're always on the forefront of language change). I certainly had to change how I pronounced it to emphatically include a "d" when I moved to Germany, where "ice coffee" sounds too much like the name of a different beverage, "Eiskaffee." Iced coffee is quite a bit newer than these other things and people are much more widely literate nowadays, so the change hasn't percolated through to writing, but I think it's already a thing in speech.
Also, as an informative tangent, ice cream isn't made by freezing the cream or custard mixture. You're actually trying to avoid straight-up freezing it. Ice cream was traditionally made by constantly agitating the cream or custard mixture in a container that itself was inside a tub containing a freezing mixture of ice and salt, which causes the cream or custard mixture to congeal rather than freeze outright. This outer freezing mixture is certainly what the "icing" in "iced cream" was. I suspect "congealed cream" didn't sound as appealing.
...huh. I do not, although by my own logic it seems like that should be the normal usage! My regimented programmer brain definitely wants words to be nice and orderly and fit consistent patterns,...
...huh.
I do not, although by my own logic it seems like that should be the normal usage! My regimented programmer brain definitely wants words to be nice and orderly and fit consistent patterns, my squishy human language brain absolutely thinks adding "-ed" to those also sounds off.
If I really wanted to stretch I guess "popcorn" as a single word that lost a few letters when the separate words got stuck together makes sense, and there's the iced vs frozen distinction that @kollkana mentioned for "ice cream", but honestly I prefer your stand for consistency in suffixing here!
You'll absolutely hear people say "whip cream" though, and it's rather often even further shortened to just "whip" (and not just in brand names like Cool Whip, but also when referring to adding...
You'll absolutely hear people say "whip cream" though, and it's rather often even further shortened to just "whip" (and not just in brand names like Cool Whip, but also when referring to adding whipped cream as a topping at places like Starbucks).
Certain Canadian brands sell "Whipping Cream" when it's liquid and whipped when it's ready to eat already whipped. Aerosol cans cheat because they're actually liquid not yet whipped but it's...
Certain Canadian brands sell "Whipping Cream" when it's liquid and whipped when it's ready to eat already whipped. Aerosol cans cheat because they're actually liquid not yet whipped but it's Whipped on the can for customer clarity I guess.
I’d never really thought about it when shopping in either country, but now that you say it yeah, you’d think the UK would be right up there on additional options to fill out the tea possibility...
I’d never really thought about it when shopping in either country, but now that you say it yeah, you’d think the UK would be right up there on additional options to fill out the tea possibility matrix!
It's not like we're stuck with just the "big three" choices though. Extra-high-fat Jersey milk, aka 'gold top', is easy enough to find and in the video they did have some old-school...
It's not like we're stuck with just the "big three" choices though. Extra-high-fat Jersey milk, aka 'gold top', is easy enough to find and in the video they did have some old-school non-homogenised milk (it was always a treat in the olde dayes to be the first to open a bottle of milk and get the cream on your cereal). I would have to check next time I'm in the big shop but I've definitely seen extra-filtered, low-lactose, goat, sheep. Then there's every type of milk but organic, or UHT, or both. The milk aisle is not a small one! Don't even get me started on the non-animal milks.
My local Asda has camel's milk, which I've heard is delicious. But I don't go into Asda if I can help it.
Okay there are two archaic concepts in this here sentence. I'm fairly old now and we used to have Trappist Haven Monastery milk subscription, where we'd get bottles delivered and you have to put...
(it was always a treat in the olde dayes to be the first to open a bottle of milk and get the cream on your cereal).
Okay there are two archaic concepts in this here sentence. I'm fairly old now and we used to have Trappist Haven Monastery milk subscription, where we'd get bottles delivered and you have to put old bottles back outside as well. But I don't think I've ever had non-homogenized! Does the end taste more skimmed as well? Do moms take the cream and use them for different things?
It's always fun in a slightly surreal way seeing that tiny things like a specific milk bottle shape match between Hong Kong and the UK! I remember being excited about getting the top of a new...
It's always fun in a slightly surreal way seeing that tiny things like a specific milk bottle shape match between Hong Kong and the UK!
I remember being excited about getting the top of a new bottle of milk on my corn flakes even as a teenager, so that'd be early 2000s, although getting milk delivered rather than at the supermarket was the kind of thing that seemed a bit quaint even then if you stopped to think about it.
Not sure if it varied by region, or perhaps even just by what my mum chose to order, but in my mind glass bottle milk on the doorstep was always non-homogenised and supermarket milk in plastic containers was always homogenised - I didn't even know non-homogenised supermarket milk was a thing until watching this video.
You did definitely end up with the rest of the milk tasting a bit "thinner" if you grabbed the first bit for your breakfast rather than giving it a shake, and I never saw anyone deliberately separate out the cream but it's the kind of thing I can fully imagine my grandparents' generation doing.
Our mailboxes used to look the same, and a lot of road signs, pedestrian railings, sewage covers etc are still the same :) for obvious reasons. But yeah even things down to milk bottles! I always...
Our mailboxes used to look the same, and a lot of road signs, pedestrian railings, sewage covers etc are still the same :) for obvious reasons. But yeah even things down to milk bottles! I always liked travelling UK exactly because of stuff like this, the incidental familiarity.
Maybe the delivery system only worked because of our sheer population density and small city footprint: 6mil people* in about 50km squared. (* 6 m people Circa 1990s - they're at 7+mil now) And then I'm not sure if they still do delivery. The online milk sales I can see use paper cartons, only import fancy Hokkaido milks use glass bottles.
Edit: checked with a buddy, he says they still have glass bottled milk (same kind) but home delivery is for select regions of the city by select companies.
I object to the word archaic in the same way I object to my kid referring to anything last century as "the olden days" but I supposed it's technically correct... :) In our house if you were the...
I object to the word archaic in the same way I object to my kid referring to anything last century as "the olden days" but I supposed it's technically correct... :)
In our house if you were the one who needed to open a (glass, delivered) bottle and the birds hadn't got to it first then you got the choice. Shake it up, add it to cereal or even just chug the first mouthful as straight cream. Woe betide any family member who didn't finish the previous bottle so they could open the next though! I don't remember the remaining milk being particularly thinner but I guess it must have been.
In the winter sometimes the milk was partially frozen which led to it being mildly ice-distilled and thus even creamier. Ice-cold cream over hot porridge is a taste I haven't thought about in a long, long time but oh, so good.
I barely remember this stuff, it was only when I was single-figures old. We were one of the last people in our street to get milk delivered and that was only because a friend of my parents owned the dairy. By the time I was at high school in the 90s we were buying plastic bottles from the supermarket like everyone else.
What does the birds part mean? Probably not literal birds that open your fridge...? These sound like very fun and unique memories :) thank you for sharing them with me. Cold cream over hot...
In our house if you were the one who needed to open a (glass, delivered) bottle and the birds hadn't got to it first
What does the birds part mean? Probably not literal birds that open your fridge...?
These sound like very fun and unique memories :) thank you for sharing them with me. Cold cream over hot porridge is something I must try one day! With berries!
i hav trouble imagining camels milk to be any sort of delicious because of how extremely hardcore of an animal they are. (Ze Frank camels : https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Sc0ZCqLUjSo) Maybe bun bun...
i hav trouble imagining camels milk to be any sort of delicious because of how extremely hardcore of an animal they are. (Ze Frank camels : https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Sc0ZCqLUjSo)
Maybe bun bun milk would be tasty. Also, I would imagine carnivorous and omnivorous milk probably would taste weird.
I like this a lot. Canadians call our whole milk Homogenized, and it says that or "Homo Milk" on the package. It would super make way more sense for them to say skimmed or homo'd, to specified...
I like this a lot. Canadians call our whole milk Homogenized, and it says that or "Homo Milk" on the package. It would super make way more sense for them to say skimmed or homo'd, to specified something has been done to it.
Is your 2% marked partially skimmed? What about 0?
1% gets called Skimmed 2% gets called Semi Skimmed 4% is Full Fat 5% is less common, and usually comes from Guernsey/Jersey or at least it comes from Guernsey breed cows, so it gets called...
1% gets called Skimmed
2% gets called Semi Skimmed
4% is Full Fat
5% is less common, and usually comes from Guernsey/Jersey or at least it comes from Guernsey breed cows, so it gets called Guernsey Milk
The US also has an informal color coding or at least I don't believe there is regulation for it. Red for whole milk, blue for 2%, green for 1%. Most brands adhere to this standard. Interesting that the colors are opposite from the UK.
I’ve seen yellow for 1% and pink for “Skim”, too
Is “skim” 1%. We call it “skimmed” here. Skim would be a verb, or maybe the product of skimming which would be like 90% fat I guess!
Ew, skimmed instead of skim makes it sound even worse than it is.
Me: linguistic prescriptivism is so silly! Words are a tool to communicate with, and any "rules" are really just arbitrary conventions to help smooth that along. Also, regional differences often point to fascinating historical forks in the road when you trace them back, there's no justification in saying one region's approach is better than any other...
Also me: "skim milk" and "whip cream" are instructions, goddammit! The product you get at the end is milk that has been skimmed, or cream that has been whipped. Now, look at that painted house, next to the paved road, with the landscaped garden, and tell me what you think we should call milk that has been skimmed?
I don't disagree with your second point, but am curious if you say "iced cream" or "popped corn"? I do and usually get funny comments.
Based on iced tea, iced coffee, and icing an injury, to "ice" something is to add ice to it, not to freeze it, so I'd say icecream is still distinct from iced cream.
The term for "ice cream" was originally "iced cream," though. The term first appeared in writing that way in the 1680s, and the variant "ice cream" did not appear until the 1740s. In English and many other languages, it's common for compound words to lack usual inflectional marking on their constituents, and it's also very common for frequently-used set noun phrases like this to become compounds over time. As a result, the superfluous past participle ending is dropped, as has happened with "iced cream," "skimmed milk," and "popped corn." This is a completely normal process that happens as part of language change, and it will continue to happen to new compounds over time no matter how many whiny prescriptivists complain about it.
I'd argue this has even happened (or at least begun to happen) to "iced coffee" in speech. Listen closely the next time someone ahead of you in line orders one -- especially if it's a teenage girl (as they're always on the forefront of language change). I certainly had to change how I pronounced it to emphatically include a "d" when I moved to Germany, where "ice coffee" sounds too much like the name of a different beverage, "Eiskaffee." Iced coffee is quite a bit newer than these other things and people are much more widely literate nowadays, so the change hasn't percolated through to writing, but I think it's already a thing in speech.
Also, as an informative tangent, ice cream isn't made by freezing the cream or custard mixture. You're actually trying to avoid straight-up freezing it. Ice cream was traditionally made by constantly agitating the cream or custard mixture in a container that itself was inside a tub containing a freezing mixture of ice and salt, which causes the cream or custard mixture to congeal rather than freeze outright. This outer freezing mixture is certainly what the "icing" in "iced cream" was. I suspect "congealed cream" didn't sound as appealing.
...huh.
I do not, although by my own logic it seems like that should be the normal usage! My regimented programmer brain definitely wants words to be nice and orderly and fit consistent patterns, my squishy human language brain absolutely thinks adding "-ed" to those also sounds off.
If I really wanted to stretch I guess "popcorn" as a single word that lost a few letters when the separate words got stuck together makes sense, and there's the iced vs frozen distinction that @kollkana mentioned for "ice cream", but honestly I prefer your stand for consistency in suffixing here!
To be clear: I do it mostly to annoy my friends.
The most noble of causes, as far as I’m concerned!
It's also definitely called whipped cream.
You'll absolutely hear people say "whip cream" though, and it's rather often even further shortened to just "whip" (and not just in brand names like Cool Whip, but also when referring to adding whipped cream as a topping at places like Starbucks).
Certain Canadian brands sell "Whipping Cream" when it's liquid and whipped when it's ready to eat already whipped. Aerosol cans cheat because they're actually liquid not yet whipped but it's Whipped on the can for customer clarity I guess.
Haven't 1% and 2% also been skimmed, just less thoroughly?
Since you mention it, the three options in the UK are “skimmed”, “semi-skimmed” or “whole” ;)
It does seem quite funny that the UK has fewer options in this regard than the US.
I’d never really thought about it when shopping in either country, but now that you say it yeah, you’d think the UK would be right up there on additional options to fill out the tea possibility matrix!
It's not like we're stuck with just the "big three" choices though. Extra-high-fat Jersey milk, aka 'gold top', is easy enough to find and in the video they did have some old-school non-homogenised milk (it was always a treat in the olde dayes to be the first to open a bottle of milk and get the cream on your cereal). I would have to check next time I'm in the big shop but I've definitely seen extra-filtered, low-lactose, goat, sheep. Then there's every type of milk but organic, or UHT, or both. The milk aisle is not a small one! Don't even get me started on the non-animal milks.
My local Asda has camel's milk, which I've heard is delicious. But I don't go into Asda if I can help it.
At least we haven't reached the dog's milk yet.
Okay there are two archaic concepts in this here sentence. I'm fairly old now and we used to have Trappist Haven Monastery milk subscription, where we'd get bottles delivered and you have to put old bottles back outside as well. But I don't think I've ever had non-homogenized! Does the end taste more skimmed as well? Do moms take the cream and use them for different things?
It's always fun in a slightly surreal way seeing that tiny things like a specific milk bottle shape match between Hong Kong and the UK!
I remember being excited about getting the top of a new bottle of milk on my corn flakes even as a teenager, so that'd be early 2000s, although getting milk delivered rather than at the supermarket was the kind of thing that seemed a bit quaint even then if you stopped to think about it.
Not sure if it varied by region, or perhaps even just by what my mum chose to order, but in my mind glass bottle milk on the doorstep was always non-homogenised and supermarket milk in plastic containers was always homogenised - I didn't even know non-homogenised supermarket milk was a thing until watching this video.
You did definitely end up with the rest of the milk tasting a bit "thinner" if you grabbed the first bit for your breakfast rather than giving it a shake, and I never saw anyone deliberately separate out the cream but it's the kind of thing I can fully imagine my grandparents' generation doing.
Our mailboxes used to look the same, and a lot of road signs, pedestrian railings, sewage covers etc are still the same :) for obvious reasons. But yeah even things down to milk bottles! I always liked travelling UK exactly because of stuff like this, the incidental familiarity.
Maybe the delivery system only worked because of our sheer population density and small city footprint: 6mil people* in about 50km squared. (* 6 m people Circa 1990s - they're at 7+mil now) And then I'm not sure if they still do delivery. The online milk sales I can see use paper cartons, only import fancy Hokkaido milks use glass bottles.
Edit: checked with a buddy, he says they still have glass bottled milk (same kind) but home delivery is for select regions of the city by select companies.
I object to the word archaic in the same way I object to my kid referring to anything last century as "the olden days" but I supposed it's technically correct... :)
In our house if you were the one who needed to open a (glass, delivered) bottle and the birds hadn't got to it first then you got the choice. Shake it up, add it to cereal or even just chug the first mouthful as straight cream. Woe betide any family member who didn't finish the previous bottle so they could open the next though! I don't remember the remaining milk being particularly thinner but I guess it must have been.
In the winter sometimes the milk was partially frozen which led to it being mildly ice-distilled and thus even creamier. Ice-cold cream over hot porridge is a taste I haven't thought about in a long, long time but oh, so good.
I barely remember this stuff, it was only when I was single-figures old. We were one of the last people in our street to get milk delivered and that was only because a friend of my parents owned the dairy. By the time I was at high school in the 90s we were buying plastic bottles from the supermarket like everyone else.
What does the birds part mean? Probably not literal birds that open your fridge...?
These sound like very fun and unique memories :) thank you for sharing them with me. Cold cream over hot porridge is something I must try one day! With berries!
Birds not in the fridge, but on the doorstep before the humans awake
Oh it was literal! And what an adorable lost tradition!
i hav trouble imagining camels milk to be any sort of delicious because of how extremely hardcore of an animal they are. (Ze Frank camels : https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Sc0ZCqLUjSo)
Maybe bun bun milk would be tasty. Also, I would imagine carnivorous and omnivorous milk probably would taste weird.
Skim is less than 1% (generally considered fat free)
I like this a lot. Canadians call our whole milk Homogenized, and it says that or "Homo Milk" on the package. It would super make way more sense for them to say skimmed or homo'd, to specified something has been done to it.
Is your 2% marked partially skimmed? What about 0?
Why is only whole milk called that? Even skim is homogenized.
Huh.
Huh. I never thought about that. Maybe there's not enough fats for it to seperate when it's not whole milk?
1% gets called Skimmed
2% gets called Semi Skimmed
4% is Full Fat
5% is less common, and usually comes from Guernsey/Jersey or at least it comes from Guernsey breed cows, so it gets called Guernsey Milk
17 minutes of milk history. It's way more interesting than you might expect.
Chris Spargo is basically Tom Scott v2
Really cool channel, subscribed!