semi-skim

[Lynne Murphy]

Damien (or anyone!), if you're interested, I've blogged about US/UK milk
differences:
<http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2008/04/milk-and-tea.html>

Lynne
--On 27 February 2011 12:29 +0000 Damien Hall <damien.hall at YORK.AC.UK>
wrote:

> 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



Dr M Lynne Murphy
Senior Lecturer in Linguistics
Director of English Language and Linguistics
School of English
Arts B348
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QN

phone: +44-(0)1273-678844
http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com

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