Language query

[besleybean]

Sorry, this is from Hudson and Rex.

I just heard them use the term 'cinema'.

I have honestly never heard a North American use that word.

I thought it was all 'theaters' or at least 'movie theaters'.

Is it a Canadian thing?

[Carol the Dabbler]

I'm not familiar with the people you mentioned, but there is indeed a certain amount of vocabulary difference between Canadians and Americans.  They call the last letter of the alphabet "zed," for example, whereas we call it "zee."  As for "cinema" vs "theater/re" vs "movies," there's quite a lot of variation within the US.  Some people here claim that "theater" refers to movie establishments, while "theatre" refers only to stage establishments (but I think that's a bit of silly snobbery).  "Cinema" tends to refer to places that show "art" (i.e., mostly foreign) films.

But I've been noticing recently that Americanisms and Britishisms seem to be crossing the Atlantic in both directions.  I've heard folks from over your way saying "pants" when clearly referring to outer garments, for example.  On the other hand, there's the phrase "went missing," which I take to be British in origin, but which is used quite a lot here these days, probably because we didn't already have an exact synonym.

 

[besleybean]

Actually, my mother-in-law always used the word 'pants'.

I think I was aware of it growing up...certainly makes more sense of the word 'underpants'.

Possibly for some Brits, 'knickers' seems so rude...

which is maybe how we got onto 'trousers' and pants...altho we said knix, when growing up.

 

[Carol the Dabbler]

7 hours ago, besleybean said:

my mother-in-law always used the word 'pants'.

In the sense of outer-wear. you mean?  Maybe it's a regionalism within the UK.  I recall someone tracing the term "you all" (which is common usage in the southeastern US) back to an area in, I think, western England.  So maybe we got that meaning of "pants" in a similar way -- though it could just as plausibly be a now-discarded usage in the UK that was current in the early 1600s (same as "fall" meaning the season that comes after summer).

 

[besleybean]

Fall is an interesting one for me.

I can't remember if we have had this discussion before, so forgive any repetition.

Although I love both the descriptive and poetic aspects of Fall...

I prefer Autumn, as it's so specific.

I can't help thinking of The Fall of the Roman Empire, or The Fall of Man etc...

[Carol the Dabbler]

On 10/17/2025 at 7:45 PM, besleybean said:

I can't remember if we have had this discussion before

Yes, we have, over in The Language Thread.

Here's your preference for "autumn" from October of 2022: 

On 10/21/2022 at 1:29 AM, besleybean said:

Autumn can't mean much else.

Whereas Fall:

a trip, a fall from grace, how a coin toss fell, 'it fell upon me'...

all those kind of things.

Autumn can be descriptive, but it generally just refers to the season.

 

... and here's my discovery of how it came to be called "fall" over here: 

On 10/29/2022 at 10:45 PM, Carol the Dabbler said:

... the word "autumn" was borrowed from French (not difficult, since French was presumably still the language of the upper class in the 1300s).  But by the 1600s that term had apparently lost its new-word smell, so somebody thought of calling it "fall."  And of course the 1600s was also the time when British colonization of North America began -- so the colonists brought the trendy new word with them.  We've kept on using it, but apparently you folks got tired of it after a bit and went back to saying "autumn."

See you back here in another three years!