MetaFic

"A lot" = ?

"Far" = ?

Temporary relo of 9k miles. Travel about 20k/month. Impact? Pocket dementor.

I don't travel around except for family visits and vacations, which I don't think count. 9 years ago, however, I relocated from Texas to New England, and I do think that that transition eventually led me to writing. Being new to the area effectively gave me a lot of time to write, and I've found that I have less time now that I'm more acclimated and more involved in life in general. I suspect that if I moved to a new place again, I would experience the same pattern.

Acclimated, is really a word?

Onto the subject.

The last time I worked up town (ie in the City of London), I had a client based in Herftfordshire which meant I travelled a lot out and in from Kings Cross a lot. I wrote a lot of my early fanfic on that train and it was particularly apt given the station.

I did use the final few miles into the station in a fic and had some one query my facts, needless to say I was very sure of them.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/acclimated

To habituate to a new climate; = acclimatize v., now much more common. lit. and fig. Now chiefly U.S.

So still a word I can cringe at like normalcy and drug -which I understand is common in Old and Middle English. :p

I grew up in Canada and we frequently used the word acclimated. Americans who moved north had to acclimate to our climate as well as our culture. It just seemed like a normal word to me.

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"Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside a dog it's too dark to read" Groucho Marks

I started writing after I left the Navy. As for travel, I tend to want to write when I am traveling on vacation, but I never want to write when I am traveling for business.

- “Perhaps, in those days, there were a few among men, a few of clear sight and clean soul, who refused to surrender that word ["I"]. What agony must have been theirs before that which they saw coming and could not stop! Perhaps they cried out in protest

"acclimated" not be a word?! :)

I travel for work. My typical week when on the road involves two to three days where I actually work, and that's around four hours a day - the rest is waiting. I'm an Olympic-class waiter. A head waiter. A fellow-in-waiting. So I have a ton of down-time. THe funny part is, because I love being home, it often sours my mood when I'm away and so I don't want to write.

...what word would you use instead of acclimated? Or normalcy? Of course, I'm from a region where we use the word "boughten" as in "store-bought"...I'm told this "isn't a word" by friends.

As for the topic, I started reading a lot more since moving to a new city. I've dabbled in writing, but nothing I would ever share and mostly just little vignettes about goofy things that tend to happen around me.

Acclimated - acclimatised
Normalcy - normality

I did run these words past people from various areas of of the UK to check if I've missed something and their reaction was the same as mine.

Finally, I wonder why you'd add store to bought?

vs. home-made.

Do you suppose we could convince Parakletos to read some Laura Ingalls Wilder? Juvenile literature or not, that's the best answer to his question.

And bought on its own doesn't do the job? I suppose I should give this up because there will be no happy ending :)

I was thinking that it meant "brand new" as opposed to bought second-hand or remaindered, or something like that.

I can imagine an American Hyacinth BucketBouquet going on about something or other being "store-bought", not like her next door.

Ha! All I know is that my grandma would either say "store-bought dress" or "boughten dress" as opposed to a handmade one. Saying "That's a lovely bought dress you're wearing!" just sounds weird. Although, I have been known to use it as a past tense which I am told is doubly wrong. "I have boughten those before." Oops.

And incidentally, Sovran, I grew up smack dab in the middle of where all of the Little House books take place... (We had Laura Ingalls Wilder/Huckleberry Finn Days in elementary school.) So the Little House books might explain me as well.

Discussing this with Mrs P we wondered if its the fact that British English relies a lot on context for meaning rather than being explicit. Another example quoted was eye-glasses; the 'eye' would appear superfluous.

Parakletos, the real answer, without going into too much detail, is that the term "store-bought" is a cultural artefact of the colonial period in the U.S. It lingers in parts of the country, primarily (I suspect) the south and midwest, because not too long ago it was a very meaningful term. During the decades when sustenance farms, rural barter economies, and seasonal survival risks were the norm for a large part of the population, having an item that was bought at a store rather than homemade was an accomplishment and a status symbol. I've heard that basic term applied to everything from bread to clothes to furniture. I'm pretty sure that the equivalent period in UK history is a lot further back, so it's no surprise that the concept (and related terminology) has faded out. I suspect that within another 100 years or so, people in the US will no longer use "store-bought," either.

When that and many other phrases go away, the world will be the poorer for their loss. However, perhaps the overuse of "awesome" will go away too, though it will surely be replaced by something even more regrettable.

BTW "boughten" makes good linguistic sense.

Hear, hear to this, the loss of dialectic English makes us all poorer.

Especially considering that most people in that area were either speaking German or Czech as their first language as recently as 60 years ago. I haven't studied Czech that extensively, but German definitely would lend to using boughten as a formal past tense...so see, I'm not crazy! ;) And Sovran, I would suspect that it's mainly older people who use it (store-bought) now, so I wouldn't be surprised if it phases out even sooner. What's not store-bought any more? Most people don't know how to sew or bake well enough to do it regularly.

I speak as my family have for years because I like being from somewhere, not born at the intersection of Whitebread and Velveeta streets, with the Starbucks on one corner and the 7-11 on another. I grew up in a very singular city, a port city, and then moved to one that seems almost apologetic for its culture (as it's populated by many people who left something behind in order to come there and reinvent themselves), so this is an issue for me. I have a regional accent when it's appropriate or when I'm tired, and I have others when I'm far afield (in the UK, for example), and they're something that folds me into the environment. (And it gets you served a little faster in the pubs in Liverpool...) We should all be happy for these differences. It makes the world less homogeneous.

You know the bit of grass between opposing lanes of traffic? Depending on where you're from it's called the central reservation, the neutral ground, the median...if we have different words for that, doesn't it make things more interesting overall?

And by the way, it always amuses me when people underestimate me because my accent shows itself - as if that's an indicator of intelligence.

You're either from the South, too, or the experience is far more universal than I believed.

How many times have you seen some one judge, say, an immigrant who doesn't speak English well and is shy and comes from a country where people are actually polite and civil with one another?

But yes, I'm from the South. We have stupid people and smart people, just like everywhere else. There are racists here, just like everywhere else. Why somehow it's worse coming from someone who stretches their vowels a bit is beyond me.

Harry Potter!

The accents that fit that bill in the UK are East Anglia, in particular Norfolk where my parents live, the West Country (Weasleylan) and Birmingham where my mum was born.