I was a bit surprised to discover the whole jelly-jello language thing. I’d always assumed when people spoke of nailing jelly to a wall that they were talking about something jam-like, not jello-like. I’ve not done the experiments, but I would assume attempting the former would be much less successful.
They also got it wrong in their explanation. To Americans, jelly is jam with the fruit bits filtered out, leading to a homogeneous spread. Jam has crushed fruit, giving it a thicker, uneven texture, and preserves are whole-ass pieces of fruit boiled down in syrup. Marmalade is jam with citrus rinds. As listed here, they are sorted in descending desirability for inclusion in a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Jam can be smooth in Britain too, the cheap ones usually are. The opposite, with chunks of fruit, is conserve. In all my years of watching TV, I've never heard an American say the word jam, it must not be very popular compared to jelly.
Meta-study: How many times can you child submit a 'is this cliched saying physically possible?' experiment to a science fair before their teachers realise that they're taking the piss?
This page is copyright 2005 by Graeme Cole. What are you allowed to do with it? Pfft. Anything within the realms of common sense, really. I don't want to prescribe rigidly what people can and can't do with it, so I've decided on a benchmark. It's this: you're allowed to do with this page anything you wouldn't mind me doing with your cat. So yes, you can photoshop it for comedy effect, you can copy bits of it for illustrative purposes and so on, but you can't steal it and pass it off as your own.
5 comments