Could someone please confirm what “dish soap” is please for those of us that aren’t American. It’s soap for cleaning dishes in the sink, right? (as opposed to soap for washing hands). In the UK we refer to dish soap as washing-up liquid. Don’t want to use the wrong stuff!
My parents are both chemists. They use "soap" specifically for soaps that are made from fat and lye, and "detergent" for synthetic surfactants.
Oddly enough, powdered dishwasher detergent contains neither. At least the stuff I use is mostly sodium carbonate, which is alkaline and combines with fats in the food to make them soluble by turning them into soap. It is also an abrasive. And cheap.
A functional difference is that in areas with hard water (such as where I live), soap forms soap scum, which is calcium stearate. You used to be able to buy bar soap that was actually detergent, but it's no longer made -- there's a glut of tallow and lard that makes "natural" soap cheaper. So my family now uses liquid body wash instead of bar soap in the shower, and I don't have to spend every Saturday scrubbing soap scum away.
None of this gets to why some stuff is called "soap" in the vernacular. For instance, I call everything "soap."
> Us Americans can get pretty craaazy with our naming conventions!
This really goes both ways. :) Wait until you find out about "public schools" in the UK, or at least England.
(They're independent private schools which are not government-funded, and are in fact far less public than government-funded state schools. As I understand it, they came to be known as "public" because they were successors to traditional homeschooling in a private environment.)
Canadian here. Detergent is what you put in an automated dishwashing appliance. Dish soap could be either detergent or dish soap for washing things by hand. Dish pods are pre-bundled detergent with liquid that helps stains from forming.
Sometimes you see "dishwasher soap" or "dishwasher detergent" for the stuff you put in the machine, as opposed to "dish soap" which is used in the sink.
Eww. The bathroom (or restroom) is the room the toilet lives in. Water Closet is fine I guess, just sounds so antiquated.
The toilet is the thing you poop in. When a Brit or Aussie says, "I"m in the toilet..." I just see someone standing in the pot trying to flush themselves down.
Also, watch out when you ask simple questions like, "Which team do you root for?" because apparently those perverts across the pond think that's a filthy question to ask.
At work someone asked me for a rubber. I sort of knew what they meant, but I had a condom in my travel bag so I gave it to them. The look of like shock was worth it.
Localization man... it's a bitch. Idioms take time to learn.
A good number (most?) don't say that. They say, "I'm in the bathroom."
A bathroom is the room with the bathtub, and since the plumbing is also there, there's usually a sink and toilet next to it. Variations include a shower instead of a bathtub, and sometimes a "water closet" — a small room that is part of the larger bathroom where the toilet is. This smaller room is sometimes called the "toilet room."
Thanks in advance.