A list of duties in an organisation, school, club, flatshare, etc.
Have you got the roster for this month? Who's responsible for cleaning the kitchen? They look like they haven't been touched.
Or the schedule for different posts in an organisation like a hospital. We can see it used as a verb here.
I'm rostered on for nights next week but then I have four days off straight so I guess that's something.
According to the roster, I am on front desk until 11 when Stuart comes to relieve me.
In American English schedule or rota may replace this word.
What is interesting is that roster comes to English from Dutch and is derived from the word roast.
Apparently someone made a connection between the straight lines of the grid or grill and a list of duties. Or maybe they thought that being rostered on to something was like having a hot iron applied. Go figure!
A kipper is a very British term. A fish, usually a herring, preserved in salt and then smoked. Kippers seemed to be a popular breakfast dish at one point and presumably were very practical and long lasting. I don't really remember them growing up in New Zealand, as we don't have herrings for a start and fish smoked to a leathery quality was not so common. So, I suspect, kipper is a word that is not well known to much of the English speaking world.
Now there is a reminder of them in the term Ukipper which you see in articles about British politics. It refers to a member of the UK Independence Party which was one of the leading protagonists in Brexit or the idea of getting Britain out of Europe. Ukippers are regarded as having very particular views that often cause mirth or exasperation in others.
Did you know that Gaz is a Ukipper? Saw him being interviewed at a meeting on television the other night!
The photo is of their most famous leader Nigel Farage.
In British English there are some words related to pudding, which are not very complimentary. I often wondered why people would use puddings as an insult. Let's have a look.
I first heard of students being described as puddings and probably used it myself too. The profile of such a person would be a sort of lump in the corner of the classroom barely reacting to anything and hard to move or enthuse. Solid and lacking in any inspiration. I have also heard blancmange used in a similar way.
Those three puddings never opened their mouth during the whole lesson.
Alfie just sits there like a blancmange and expects everyone to entertain him.
Blancmange, pronounced /bləˈmɒndʒ/ with the 'nc' silent is a sort of cross between a milk pudding and a jelly. White and insipid with a jellyish tremble if touched. Probably an acquired taste as milk and cornstarch are not immediate partners in my book.
I believe it was the name of a successful band too.
Europudding was common in the last decade, though you hear it less seldom. It described movies made by the combined money and efforts of various European nations. The actors would come from different countries putting up the money, the film could well have been in a "neutral" language like English even though none of the protagonists were native speakers and there was no good artistic reason to use it. Many of this type of film are stolid or heavy and unconvincing as they are built more from financial compromise than from pure artistic vision. Perhaps the Eiffel Tower appears simply to sell the film rather than being part of the story.
Henry invested in a film last year. Typical Europudding. Boring, incomprehensible and sank like a stone at the box office despite the cast of famous actors and the pretty landscapes in it.
Scrumptious is one of those words that sounds so nice, particularly as it means delicious. Perhaps it was more commonly used in the past than now but we still hear people talking about a cake or a dish being scrumptious.
Marge, your carrot cake is simply scrumptious.
The table for lunch was full of scrumptious tarts and pies.
Apparently, the word derives from sumptuous which means magnificent, lavish and expensive and can include non-food items like furnishings.
Scrumptious however seems to apply to food and those drinks that have a food-like quality such as smoothies or shakes. A simple juice or cocktail is less likely to be scrumptious. For me, that suggests a sense of volume or body in the food. Something scrumptious is food or drink you savour. It doesn't just slip down.
An informal British version is Scrummy, which reminds us of Yummy. Scrummy would seem to be more limited to food than yummy which I have seen used to refer to people and feelings as well.
Scrumpy is a term for dry cider from the West of England.