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[–] 71 points 20 hours ago (21 children)

for any ameroid that didn't instinctively know what a "water butt" is, it's apparently what they call drums/barrels for rainwater catchment in gardening within the UK. could be wrong, because i just learnt this.

if you search it, you can see all the fancy, modernist and metropolitan shapes they are sold in, unlike the US where we all seem to have those same 50 gal ones that are like bright blue or white and probably leach PBAs or whatever and would require like 3 stout men to lift when full and one of them would have to go lay down for the rest of the day.

a water butt is not a butt that squirts water.

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  • [–] 19 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago)

    Likely the same "butt" as in "buttload", either from Anglo-Norman or from Proto-West Germanic but in any case ultimately from Ancient Greek bouttis via Latin buttis. The names of the ball sports bocce and boccia are from the same source, as are so many languages' words for barrel, cask, bucket, head, and/or pumpkin that I'm not going to bother listing them all, just know that the list includes languages like Ubykh, Armenian, Georgian, Turkish, Kyrgyz, Kazakh, Udmurt, Mongolian, Arabic, Maltese, Irish, unsurprisingly Greek, and seemingly every extant Romance, Germanic, and Slavic language, and quite a few other languages with a lot of loanwords from the aforementioned.

    Most relevantly for me is that I had Stewart Clark's "Broken English" books as a kid, which included assorted Bushisms (real or spurious), machine-translated Chinese restaurant menus, and various other "Epic Fails™" with the English language of that ilk. It being a book written for Norwegian audiences, a lot of its pages were dedicated more specifically to collecting anecdotes of Scandinavians using a first-language false friend when speaking English to humorous effect. And so…

    [Unreconstructed Pre-Greek substrate] → Ancient Greek bouttis ("cask, barrel") → Latin buttis → Vulgar Latin *buttia → Proto-West Germanic *buttjā → Middle Low German butte → Old Norse bytta ("pail, bucket") → Danish bøtte → Norwegian bøtte

    …This is the nearly 3,500 year long Rube Goldberg machine that led to the following probably spurious anecdote of the "Norwegian is bad at English, please laugh because you are Norwegian and good at English" genre of joke, which I personally first encountered in one of Stewart Clark's "Broken English" books:

    A Frenchman and a Norwegian are fishing together. The Frenchman catches a huge fish and excitedly asks, "Where shall I put it?"

    The Norwegian replies, "Just put it in the butt."

    [the two are immediately killed by a rain of drums and cymbals]


    christmas-crab-legs You should watch SPARKLE ON RAVEN: The Life of DrillGirl; it is a very good show. {Cēterum|Furthermore} {cēnseō|I think} {iūs auctōris|copyright} {esse dēlendum|must be destroyed}.

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  • [–] 12 points 16 hours ago (3 children)

    I believe that's also where we got the term "butt" referring to the shoulder cut of pork - they were stored in that type of barrel which was called a butt.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 hours ago*

    As a butcher, I was told it came from the same etymology as "butting" someone with your shoulder. As in - (hitting someone with) the end of something.

    EDIT: the funnier etymology is with Beef. A beef shoulder is called a "Clod", literally because it's a big messy hunk of meat.

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  • [–] 35 points 20 hours ago (8 children)

    scribbling frantically in a notebook

    Butt = barrel

    Butty = Sandwich?

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  • [–] 8 points 15 hours ago (2 children)
  • [–] 3 points 12 hours ago (1 child)

    i made one of these once. like toasted two pieces and put a normal soft piece between them. it kind of works out, texture wise, but it's nothing i would admit to publicly.

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  • [–] 33 points 20 hours ago (4 children)

    Just in case anyone is actually interested:

    • A butt, as in 'water butt', comes from the old English word "butte". Meaning, 'barrel/container'.

    • A butty is an informal abbreviation of the word 'butter'. I think it became a stand-in for 'sandwich' because of the most basic of all sandwiches, 'bread and butter'.

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  • [–] 9 points 16 hours ago (2 children)

    Oh, in lower northern German, that's a bütte/bütt/butte. But I wouldn't have made the connection.

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  • [–] 6 points 16 hours ago (1 child)

    Interesting! I wonder if it means that 'butt' is actually etymologically linked to 'vat', then. Not only are they close enough to plausibly be related, but also I saw in dutch that it's 'regenvat'. 🤔

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