Looking for something easy to blog about, I was reading through old email requests from back in the days when I was in (the) hospital, waiting for Grover to be born. Grover's going to be three in December, so there's a little insight into just how untidy that email inbox is and how many unblogged-about topics might be lurking there.
At any rate, then-reader (are you still out there?) Catnap in the US wrote to me about some British recipes she'd been reading, including one for brownies. She correctly surmised that brownies are not the institution in the UK that they are in the US--but they've become much better known/loved in the decade that I've lived here. (I've never known a British non-professional-baker person to actually make brownies. One tends to get 'gourmet' brownies here--and they can be incredible. Like the raspberry ones made by Prosperity Brownies. Ooh, I'm getting palpitations just thinking about them.) It's all part of this craze for importing and "fancifying" American baked goods.
At any rate, the BrE word that Catnap noted in the recipe was squidgey, which the OED and I spell squidgy. The older sense of this word in OED, from the 19th century, is 'Short and plump; podgy' And here we pause to note that BrE prefers podgy, but AmE uses pudgy almost exclusively.
The second sense of squidgy is the brownie sense:
This sense of squidgy is only noted since the 1970s, but squdgy, a word that looks like a typo, has been around and meaning 'soft and moist or yielding' starting with Kipling:
The only other differing -dgy adjective I can think of is dodgy, which the OED has as:
The Lesson of the Post is thus: BrE likes adjectives ending in -dgy more than AmE does!
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At any rate, then-reader (are you still out there?) Catnap in the US wrote to me about some British recipes she'd been reading, including one for brownies. She correctly surmised that brownies are not the institution in the UK that they are in the US--but they've become much better known/loved in the decade that I've lived here. (I've never known a British non-professional-baker person to actually make brownies. One tends to get 'gourmet' brownies here--and they can be incredible. Like the raspberry ones made by Prosperity Brownies. Ooh, I'm getting palpitations just thinking about them.) It's all part of this craze for importing and "fancifying" American baked goods.
At any rate, the BrE word that Catnap noted in the recipe was squidgey, which the OED and I spell squidgy. The older sense of this word in OED, from the 19th century, is 'Short and plump; podgy' And here we pause to note that BrE prefers podgy, but AmE uses pudgy almost exclusively.
The second sense of squidgy is the brownie sense:
Moist and pliant; squashy, soggy. Esp. of food.The definition doesn't sound very appeti{s/z}ing, but squidgy can definitely be a positive trait in a brownie.
This sense of squidgy is only noted since the 1970s, but squdgy, a word that looks like a typo, has been around and meaning 'soft and moist or yielding' starting with Kipling:
1892 KIPLING Barrack-Room Ballads 51 Elephints apilin' teak In the sludgy, squdgy creek. 1919 W. DEEPING Second Youth xvii. 145 He made haste to shake Joseph Bluett's squdgy hand and escape. 1959 M. STEEN Woman in Back Seat I. v. 97 ‘Don't you like babies?’ Lavinia shook her head... ‘They're so squdgy, and they haven't got any shape!’Looking for other -dgy adjectives that might differ, I find splodgy. OED defines it as 'Full of splodges; showing coarse splotches of colour.' In AmE, this would be splotchy (and 'full of splotches'). The OED doesn't mark splotchy as 'chiefly American', but there are no instances in the British National Corpus, as opposed to three instances of splodgy. In the Corpus of Contemporary American English, it's 78 instances of splotchy and zero splodgy.
The only other differing -dgy adjective I can think of is dodgy, which the OED has as:
Brit. colloq. Of poor quality, unreliable; questionable, dubious.One hears it in contexts like I have a dodgy knee or He's selling some dodgy goods on the internet.
The Lesson of the Post is thus: BrE likes adjectives ending in -dgy more than AmE does!