Discussion Groups / English Usage / May 2009

Yes to all that, which is why it felt wrong for someone to think in
that spelling in England in 1947.

Yes. It is the past and past participle of "spell". It is a chiefly
British alternative to "spelled".

Past tense of "spell".

Normal spelling of the past tense of spell in most of the
Commonwealth.  Spelled seems wrong to me on first sight.

John Kane Kingston ON Canada

I wonder if "thrill killer(s)" actually was used in the 1920's.  I have
it in mind that Leopold and Loeb were referred to by that term.  Only
one murder, of course, but it was rich kids who did it, with no money to
gain.  I mean, they didn't intend to write a novel and make a fortune.
No ransom request.

Still a young'un, then.

Checking on my own usage I found an entry in my diary for November 1959 in
which I referred to a friend who showed me "some hailstones as big as tennis
balls which he had kept in the fridge".

But that was the spelling I always thought of since I first learned to write.

Of course speaking (which the original example was about) is different, but
from my earliest youth my mother always called it the fridge, and I did too.
It was only much later that I learned that it was short for "refrigerator".

I did occasionally see it spelt frig or 'frig, but that that always looked odd
to me, and I always associated it with the verb "frigging", though I've never
been quite sure how something frigs, and I would pronounce it with a hard g.
Someone might say "Put it in the frigging frig".

When I was 7 (in 1948) we moved to a smallholding where there was no mains
electricity, and so we had an ice box which we called an "ice box". It was a
wooden contraption with several doors, and my father would bring home a box of
dry ice (solid carbon dioxide) which we put in one of the compartments and it
kept everything inside cold. When the dry ice machine at the chemical factory
where my father worked broke down we had to go into Johannesburg and buy wet
ice, which dripped and a tray had to be emptied. We didn't realise, of course,
that the dry ice left invisible footprints all over the place, and so never
bothered to clean them up.

When we moved again to a place with mains electricity (in 1954) we got a
fridge again, but a fridge was a fridge and an ice box was an ice box. I think
that was about the time that I learned that "fridge" was short for
"refrigerator", a word we never used in ordinary speech.

The only time I've ever heard it used in ordinary speech was in a TV
advertisement for coffee creamer, from about 20 years ago, where a man opens
the fridge door and shouts to his wife (in another room) "There's no Cemora in
the refrigerator" and she replies "It's not inside, it's on top" -- a saying
that entered everyday vocabulary for something that wasn't where one expected
to find it.

Again, checking on my own usage in my diary, over the last 40 years I used
"fridge" 32 times, and "refrigerator" just once, in referring to a mechanical
refrigerator car in a stationary train, which had a compressor that clattered
away to itself.

Evan Kirshenbaum filted:

*Thank* you....

That's what I was going for...knowing that refrigerators of one sort or another
were around as early as 1915, I was questioning the slang term itself in a scene
set on March 10th, 1928...looks like Eastwood was a good thirty years ahead of
himself on this one...(which is still better than the *forty* years he jumped
the gun on "serial killer"; you'd think a guy who starred in a near-contemporary
movie inspired by the Zodiac killer would know better)....r

Here's the OED on fridge:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Colloq. abbrev. of REFRIGERATOR 2.
  The proprietary name Frigidaire may also have contributed to the
currency of the shortened form frig. Cf. also frigerator in D.A. (quots.
1886, 1909).
1926 E. F. SPANNER Broken Trident xvi. 181 Best part of our stuff here
is chilled, and with no 'frig plant working, the mercury will climb like
a rocket. 1935 C. BROOKS Frame-Up xix. 243 Do you mean that you keep a
dead body in a fridge waiting for the right moment to bring her out?
1939 M. DICKENS One Pair of Hands xii. 198 Your frig is out of order and
the trifle hasn't got cold. 1946 News Chron. 25 Feb. 3/7 (heading) A
Communal ‘Frig.’ with 300 Lockers. 1954 I. MURDOCH Under Net vi. 90 In
the fridge was salmon, raspberries and considerable quantities of
butter, milk and cheese. 1955 G. GREENE Quiet American 90 We haven't a
frig - we send out for ice. 1960 [see BLINK n.2 1d]. 1971 Islander
(Victoria, B.C.) 21 Mar. 2/2 We usually landed more than could be eaten
fresh and having no fridge, dressed the surplus fillets with smoked salt
and hung them up to dry.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

The variation in the spelling of the abbreviation is interesting, I
think. And should Iris M have written "were" in that sentence? And what
is "smoked salt", I wonder?

I remember that ours was always referred to as a fridge when I was a
child and the first time I heard the word refrigerator was from a
visitor from the US in the mid 1950s. Shortly after that, I used the
word in a school essay and my correct spelling was amended by my
teacher, who wrote "refridgerator" in the margin of my exercise book. At
parents' evening, my father was appalled to discover this and a heated
argument ensued which IIRC concluded with a letter of apology from the
teacher for her mistake.

[...]

[...]

Nice trick if you can do it. What on earth did the writer mean?