My grandson, Scootco, posted the following on his Facebook page:
Lets us all take a moment and realize the lack of creativity in the name “fire place”.
It got me to wondering what if we named other common things in such simple cavemanesque terms.
- The telephone would be the Talk Thing
- A sink would be a Water Place
- A window could be known as a Look Out
- A microwave oven might be an Invisible Fire Thing
- A computer could be a Know It All Box
- A toilet might have been known as a Sit Upon
- A car might be called a Get Me There
- A spoon might have been called a Mouth Shovel
- A printer could be a Paper Spitter
I have a feeling the B&P readers could come up with a few more.
+11-3
If you are looking for a single word you could use hearth.
some good ones here
But we already use those kinds of words every day — we just don’t think about it because they are translated. Television literally means far off seeing thing. pocket handkerchief means small bag cloth for covering head. There’s a map floating out in the internet somewhere that gives a ton of place names in England in their plain, translated form. It’s eye-opening. Sorry to threadjack but I just think it’s fascinating.
IN GREECE WE CALL IT TZAKI
Children are know it all poop factories.
Dogs could be either cuddle with me poop factories, or chew it up poop factories, depending..
your couch is a nap upon
they already call a television an idiot box
Sometimes I will call a pen an inkstick.
I often call pens or pencils writing sticks
Haha, toilet. That’s already a caveman word (or as I like to think, the way the primitives in “Battlefield Earth” talk before they learned to mine gold and fly improbably well-preserved fighter planes).
Place “To Let”
I’m sure the idea of calling a spoon a mouth shovel would naturally occur to anyone who has seen me eating.
My sister used to get heaps of people in Houston laughing at our Australian terminology:
Car Park – Australian’s park their cars here, Americans think it’s somewhere to take your car for a run (like a dog-park)
Windscreen – Australian for windshield, Americans picture a screendoor across the front of the car!
Madison Square Garden would be “8th Avenue Round Gym”
The rear-view mirror of a car could be the “20/20″.
That’s what language is, get used to it. It’s not supposed to be creative, actually it should be as little creative as possible, as this makes it easier to learn. The only reason the other names on that list sound odd is because they are not commonly used. Every single word has a “cavemanesque” origin and the only reason some don’t sound sound “cavemanesque” now is because the terms that gave origin to it stopped being used and were forgotten.
The US Capitol could be called the Sanitarium.