Re: Wastebasket woes

[Karl Lattimer <karl qdh org uk>]

On Thu, 2010-08-26 at 15:51 +0100, Martyn Russell wrote: 
> On 26/08/10 14:31, Karl Lattimer wrote:
> > On Thu, 2010-08-26 at 14:21 +0100, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> >> I believe we already had that discussion, and "rubbish" is far to
> >> colloquial for my liking anyway.
> >
> > Exactly how can rubbish be far too colloquial? Rubbish *is* the usually
> > used written term in English _as well as_ the usual spoken term. The
> > terms, recycling bin, wastebasket and trash are scarcely if ever used in
> > English.
> >
> > Furthermore it is not marked in any of my dictionaries as "colloq" and
> > is in common usage in literature.
> 
> I have to say, I think it depends how much American you're subjected to 
> :) - I don't feel altogether uncomfortable with "garbage", "trash", etc, 
> because in my company nearly everyone uses it and sometimes I do have to 
> explain the difference, but I would never use those myself.

Technically speaking 'garbage' refers to the entrails of an animal,
expanded in modern English to mean wasted food. The word was mixed up
with the descriptive term garble (mess, siftings, waste, e.g. Look at
that garbled pile of cables behind my computer) in American English to
mean general waste. 

So it hardly applies to en_GB :)

That's just me being a pedant with regard to the English language.

> I personally use "rubbish" quite often at home and I know a lot of 
> people (friends and family) that do too. "wastebasket" seems ok to me 
> too, but I would *never* use it in speech or a written letter, so less 
> fitting. Plus "recycling" is a derivitive form of "rubbish" in my mind, 
> it doesn't apply to all "rubbish".

Rubbish is by far the most often used term to refer to waste in the UK,
and I don't see a problem with it and the concept of recycling files as
"Sifting through the *rubbish* to find something I mistakenly threw out"
isn't a conflict to the restorative functionality of our temporary
location of accumulating crud. In fact, this is a far more suitable
term, as we don't really recycle files, we just delete them, and there
is a conflict between the notion of recycling of files (I assume recycle
the hard disk space?) vs. deleting permanently *OR* restoring into
existence.

BR,
K