Embarrassed laughter from Deepest Buckinghamshire.
7.4 on the Richter scale. :blush::blush::blush:

Hey, Flint's known troll of no reform. Could be his name is really Carruthers.....

I'd argue that it is known and used everywhere in the English-speaking world. I've seen and used the phrase well before my present spate of community theater. Sixes and sevens refuse to match up until you arrive at the forty-twos. It's trouble, Monst, trouble.

Argue away. No-one uses it here......

Second and fourth one are new to me. What's the entry-level floor in England? And public school is where rich kids go? What do you call schools paid for from your taxes?
.
.

Ground floor is on the ground of course!

Private schools are generally called private schools now.
Very, very expensive and exclusive (and OLD) ones are called public schools.
The rest (such as the one I work in ) are called state schools.
But as it's the vast majority, so doesn't tend to be specified.

Private schools always used to be called public schools (because anyone with money could attend them), but not so much now.
But is someone is labelled a "public school boy" is will mean expensive education and usually family with old money and/ or land to back it up.

So the guy driving the garbage truck comes to a house where the bin has not been put out. He is about to drive past when he sees a bloke sitting on the verandah, so he calls out "Where's ya bin?"
The man replies "I bin on holiday".
The garbo calls back "Nah, where's ya wheelie bin?"
"Well, wheelie, I bin in prison, but I'm tellin people I bin on holiday".

Most other countries do the "first floor" = "one up from the ground" thing too... And in 7th grade Spanish class, my teacher tried to make us do the cultural and translational shift at the same time, so that the correct pairing according to her was

piso primero = second floor

This pissed me off to no end, because it was not the correct translation of those words. I'm pretty sure it was one of those cases where I deliberately put the wrong answer on a test because I couldn't bring myself to write what I knew she wanted us to write.

Luka would have been so confused.

[translator-nerd mode]
I beg to differ:
piso = floor (presumably)
primero = first
piso primero = second floor
This is why machine translation does not work: context is everything and this is the most succinct example of that I have ever seen! Thank you Clod!
[/translator-nerd mode]

I'm with limey -even though i'm not a professional translator. Well only from British to American.

*shrug* I'm one of those people who wants cultural notes given separately by the translator. I'm against the idea of, for example, "translating" British works of literature on the assumption that American readers are too stupid to learn that "tea" sometimes means "lunch." I want to read what was written, not what would have been written if the writer were from my culture.

On a completely unrelated note, how do the various Brits on this board say the word chiropractor?



Because I heard a guy on TV say it as "shurr-OPP-pract-uh" and it confused the hell out of me.

KY-ro-prak-ta
(should be "tor" at the end but I am writing it in realspeak)

They're not common in this country.
I knew of one who was used by a number of people (passed around you could say) but he was the first and last one I heard of.

Sure he wasn't saying Chiropodist? Foot Doctor.
Pronounced shurr-ROP-ah-dist.
Many more of those here.