UK PM David Cameron leaves 8-year-old daughter in local pub

[happyslug]

34. Tram and "Oil Strike"????

I like reading your comments and know from past reading you are NOT a native English Speaker. I do NOT have an English major (and many a member of DU have commented on my English, rarely to the good) but I have to make a comment on those two terms.

First "Tram". Tram is easy and hard. It is hard is trying to determine what is meant by the term "Tram". "Tram" is the term used in the United Kingdom for what we in the USA call a "Streetcar". "Streetcar" is believe to be the product of "German English". "English German" is the product of the huge German immigration into the US from 1848 till after 1900. Many Germans settled in cities and when it came time to translate things from German to English, the tendency was to use translating of German combinations NOT whole words.

Streetcar is an excellent example of this. The German word for Trams/Streetcar is "Strassenbahn", which is a combination of the German word "Strassen" (English translation "Street&quot and "Bahn" English translation "Car&quot . Thus in the US what they call "Trams" in the United Kingdom, became known as "Streetcars" in the US.

To make the different words one more degree worse, in the US the term "Tram" is used in the US as a short term for what is called elsewhere an "Aerial Tramway" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_tramway

Looking up Norway and Oslo it appears what you are calling a "Tram" is what we in the US call a "Streetcar" not what we in the US call an "aerial tramway" (Or sometimes a "Tram&quot . Thus once you determine the above, you see the correct term in the US is "Streetcar" not "Tram". The hard part is seeing why they is a difference between US and UK English.

Just a comment on the use of the word "Tram" on an American cite. Wikipedia will refer any request in regards to "Streetcars" to its "Trams" cite, so it is a well understood difference between English as spoken in the US and the UK.

One last comment: Do to the different terms used in the United Kingdom and the USA, the term "Light Rail Vehicle" (LRV) was invented in the late 1960s to be used in both countries. The problem with it, many people view the term "LRV" to mean something that goes on its own Right of Way like a regular train, but does NOT mix with regular trains, not on a streets like a Streetcar/Tram. Thus the adoption of the term LRV has NOT completely resolved the problem of using two different terms for the same thing in the United Kingdom and the USA.

Second, "Oil Strike"

The term "Oil Strike" generally means in the USA as someone drilling an oil well and striking oil NOT someone refusing to ship oil. Thus the 1973 "Oil Embargo" is called an "Oil Embargo" in the US (I do NOT know what it is called in the United Kingdom, I suspect the same wording). Sometime it is referred to as the "Oil Crisis" and "Oil Boycott, but NEVER an "Oil Strike".