Interesting Facts

A survey carried out by linguistics researchers at Manchester University found there were 7 different words for a bread roll in the UK. (In the South it was generally called a roll. In the North a bap or a bun. In the North-west a barm, or a muffin. In the Midlands a cob. In Yorkshire a tea cake! Now I'll go along with roll or a cob, but to me a bap is a softer, more floury bread roll, a muffin is an American cake, a bun is sweet and hopefully full of cream, and a tea cake is full of dried fruit and has to be toasted and served with lots of butter.)

The Romanian Academy, Romania's linguistic watchdog, has promised to change the definition of an anti-Semitic word included in a widely-circulated dictionary. (The offending dictionary gave the definition of the word 'jidan', (a pejorative term for Jew), as merely a "familiar" term. A Jewish group, The Centre for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism in Romania, slammed it as "shameful", and the academy promised in a letter, "In future editions of the dictionary, definitions will be worded so as not to leave room for discriminatory interpretations. Hmm - I wonder what they'd make of the Urban Dictionary.")