semi-skim

[Damien Hall]

The bottle of semi-skimmed milk in our (UK) fridge right now has 1.7% fat,
and the bottle of skimmed 0.1% fat. This confirms my intuition, when I
lived in the US, that US 2% milk was closer to UK semi-skimmed than US 1%
milk was. In this country, you used to only be able to get three levels of
fat content in milk - full-fat (US 'whole'), semi-skimmed and skimmed - but
I'm now noticing that at least some supermarkets now sell two intermediate
levels between full-fat and skimmed: 2% and 1%.

NB the participial ending in my '(semi-)skimmed', which I didn't type
automatically: in the UK, at least, the full participle-derived adjective
is usually still preserved in these words, unlike in the US. A quick and,
admittedly, unscientific Yahoo! search points in this direction too:

"semi-skim milk" at .uk sites:  111 hits

"semi-skimmed milk" at .uk sites:  838,000 hits (presumably approximately)

The results are less conclusive for Australia, perhaps because the <.au>
domain isn't as commonly-used there as the <.uk> domain is here?

"semi-skim milk" at .au sites:  43 hits

"semi-skimmed milk" at .au sites:  135 hits

I searched for the 'semi-' version to try and weed out the false positives
that you might get by hitting the verb phrase when searching for 'skim
milk'.

Further notes for the seriously interested:

- There are more details of the levels of fat in milk available / permitted
in the UK, and their administrative names (which may not be the ones in
common use, of course), on the Dairy Council site here:

http://www.milk.co.uk/page.aspx?intPageID=43

- Some years ago on this list there was a discussion of the validity of
hit-counts from various search engines in 'comparative lexicography'. I can
no longer find the thread, but I seem to remember one point, that Yahoo!
hit-counts were not inflated in a way that Google ones were, so that's what
I have used here. Certainly, the ghits counts for these same searches were
much higher than the ones I have above. Possibly it was something to do
with Google counting pages and Yahoo! counting sites? I don't know.

Damien

--
Damien Hall

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