There is an apocryphal story of someone wanting to find out what percentage of people in Chicago ate porridge for breakfast. He randomly opened the phone book and rang up (there's a phrase we no longer use) everyone on his chosen page. He was surprised to find that nearly everyone did, in fact, have porridge for breakfast.
He'd unfortunately selected a page where all the surnames began with Mac or Mc ...
There's a very true story ( which following the above example is the second I regaled the students with), in the 1960s a food retailer was thinking of introducing a new product which was tinned baked beans with sausages ( a product that should be illegal). Initially market research was very negative, so negative that the manufacturer was rather suspicious. Turns out the initial research had been conducted in supermarkets in the Golders Green area of London- an area then with a very high Jewish population. When new research was commissioned in other areas, more positive results were reported.
There is an apocryphal story of someone wanting to find out what percentage of people in Chicago ate porridge for breakfast. He randomly opened the phone book and rang up (there's a phrase we no longer use) everyone on his chosen page. He was surprised to find that nearly everyone did, in fact, have porridge for breakfast.
He'd unfortunately selected a page where all the surnames began with Mac or Mc ...
I’m guessing he must have also managed to hit a page full of recent immigrants, or the children of immigrants, if they called what they had for breakfast “porridge.”
I mean that in my experience, Americans tend to say they had “oatmeal” (or “cream of wheat” or “grits” or whatever). “Porridge,” again in my experience, tends to be used here as an umbrella term for a category of dishes rather than as a name for a specific dish, unless a nursery rhyme or Goldilocks is involved.
So I spent the next twenty minutes explaining phone directories: yes there really was a book that contained the names, addresses and telephone numbers of everyone in town ( if they had a phone), yes everyone with a phone got a free copy, yes copies were available in libraries and often in public phone booths, yes every town/ community had its own directory, yes you could go ex-directory if you asked.
A guide to phone directories. Staggering. This makes me feel antediluvian.
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There's a very true story ( which following the above example is the second I regaled the students with), in the 1960s a food retailer was thinking of introducing a new product which was tinned baked beans with sausages ( a product that should be illegal). Initially market research was very negative, so negative that the manufacturer was rather suspicious. Turns out the initial research had been conducted in supermarkets in the Golders Green area of London- an area then with a very high Jewish population. When new research was commissioned in other areas, more positive results were reported.
I mean that in my experience, Americans tend to say they had “oatmeal” (or “cream of wheat” or “grits” or whatever). “Porridge,” again in my experience, tends to be used here as an umbrella term for a category of dishes rather than as a name for a specific dish, unless a nursery rhyme or Goldilocks is involved.