Looking Out To Sea

One of my recently discovered blogs is Separated by a Common Language, a sort of extended series of notes about the differences in UK and US English. The author is a linguist at some university down south.

I was recently looking through the archives and found an early post about “roiling and broiling”. The commenters were discussing types of boil, and I particularly liked this comment:

I would also note that my family has two useful terms for two stages before that:

• ‘thinking about boiling’ — when you can see lots of tiny bubbles stuck to the sides and bottom, but it’s not actually boiling yet
• ‘talking about boiling’ — visually very similar to last stage, but you can hear a rustly/ticking noise that implies it’s about to start boiling anytime, really, once it gets around to it.

I really like these.