Refrigerators, Reckon, and the Connotations of Words in Different Countries

Okay, we finally broke down and bought a nice new super-sized American refrigerator. When our last one broke down, we replaced it from one from Freecycle, which remarkably lasted almost 4 years. But it was much too small, we couldn’t find things, and things were always getting lost, forgotten, crushed, rancid. And so, as people do when they buy things they probably could have done without, we praised ourselves to ourselves for how much money we were saving by buying a big new fridge.

And so we bought a nice new shiny massive American refrigerator. And oh-uh, it is populated by two boxes of kulfi icecream, which formerly Roy would have stopped me buying saying there was no room in (the inn of our bodies) or the fridge, and lots of fruit, veggies, types of hummus, jams, dressings, sauces, which we were restrained about acquiring because of our tiny old fridge.

When the fridge arrived, Irene stepped into it, and beamed. And I hope as the months go on, we will all be beaming, and it won’t encourage us to gain extra weight or spend extra money, both of which we can ill-afford.

Fridge. When I went to America as a graduate student in the 80ies, everyone laughed when I said Fridge. Why? I asked baffled. “Only blacks say fridge,” my fellow students explained. “We say refrigerator.”

Blacks and English people, it appears. No one in Oxford says refrigerator!

Another popular word here “reckon” was similarly laughed at in my American graduate school as a hilly-billy word. I had acquired a bit of an English accent in my three years at Oxford, so I suppose these infelicities were particularly amusing in that accent.

I lived in America for 17 years. I now have an accent with traces of all my three countries. A world class accent, I suppose!