This was indeed the entire Around the Houses conversation we eventually had: the dried baking “currants” (or Zante currants) that one finds in the store even in NorAm turn out to be a kind of raisin, made from grapes - which none of us, including several bakers, knew because COLLOQUIALLY and in most other favouring (tea etc) “currant” gets parsed as the collection of “black/red/whitecurrant” with black being the result.
With further investigation it turns out that the kind of NorAm person who corrects everyone else with “those are SULTANAS, you can only use RAISINS to mean the DARK ones -!” often does know and sniffs as they sniff at the rest of us for calling sultanas “golden raisins”, but on a colloquial level a lot of people don’t.
So it’s not just the division between NorAm and UK, it’s literally different colloquial NorAm subsets.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regna
(no subject)
Date: 2025-05-07 03:09 pm (UTC)With further investigation it turns out that the kind of NorAm person who corrects everyone else with “those are SULTANAS, you can only use RAISINS to mean the DARK ones -!” often does know and sniffs as they sniff at the rest of us for calling sultanas “golden raisins”, but on a colloquial level a lot of people don’t.
So it’s not just the division between NorAm and UK, it’s literally different colloquial NorAm subsets.