Shrimp(s) and prawns

[Chris Waigl]

On 12 Mar 2009, at 06:18, Paul A Johnston, Jr. wrote:
>
> In the UK, they're all prawns--

Except of the lovely raw shrimp my flatmate and I keep buying on
Shepherd's Bush market. She is just as likely to refer to the animals
as "prawns" as as "shrimp(s)". I just asked her "for the fish pie,
what did we get from the fish stand, pollock and..." and she completed
with "prawns, shrimps". We happened to use "shrimp", and the two women
who run the fish stand (one white London-accented, the other Jamaican)
also tend to use that term. (This is for rather large ones, maybe not
quite "tiger prawn" size, but close.)

(And yes, and she uses the s plural and the zero plural both
apparently indiscriminately, which surprised me: I consciously
unlearned "shrimps", which I'd caught from pluralizing the word when
borrowed into German and used alongside Krabben, Garnelen,
Kreventten...)

> and they do serve prawn cocktail.


Yes, I agree I haven't seen "shrimp cocktail" in the UK.

Chris
--
Chris Waigl -- http://chryss.eu -- http://eggcorns.lascribe.net
twitter: chrys -- friendfeed: chryss

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