I was reading a UK-set fanfic

[conuly]

wherein somebody sits on a twin bed, and for some reason the question asked itself: are mattress sizes the same in the UK, and do they have twin beds over there?

And the answer is no, no they don't!

So now I know, and you do too, and that about sums up what I know about the UK, so I'll also tell you something about NYC if you ever write something set here. I'll tell you two things.

First, of course, is that there are (virtually) no alleys in Manhattan. I don't care what you've seen on TV and in movies, you should hold yourself to a higher standard.

Secondly, wind patterns in Lower Manhattan before 9/11 were intense. Like, omg whoa. Those towers had one hell of an effect.

Thirdly, I can't count, and also, cashiers in the city can say "next", but more often ask the following customer to step down, which may be realized upon occasion as "following" or "step down" rather than "following (customer), please step down". This is something I didn't notice at all until somebody happened to mention it once on reddit, and immediately I was beset by the twin feelings of "wait, yeah, they do say that" and "hold on, that's not what they say everywhere!?"

Fourthly, I still can't count, and this may not be accurate to school today, but when I was a kid and when my mother was a kid, public schools in NYC spent time teaching students three chords on the piano - get ready, stand, sit down - so we could all stand and sit in unison at assembly. Mommy didn't realize it was not a universal practice until the first time she and my father went to a school thing in Brooklyn and he was left sitting after the entire audience of adults and students had stood up. And then he was left standing after they'd all sat down, having failed even the second time to recognize the musical cue.

Comments

[lilysea]

Thirdly, I can't count, and also, cashiers in the city can say "next", but more often ask the following customer to step down, which may be realized upon occasion as "following" or "step down" rather than "following (customer), please step down". This is something I didn't notice at all until somebody happened to mention it once on reddit, and immediately I was beset by the twin feelings of "wait, yeah, they do say that" and "hold on, that's not what they say everywhere!?"

Yep, in Australia

it's

"Next!"

or "Next, Please!"

or "Can I help you?"

[conuly]

or "Can I help you?"

Hearing that from a cashier, there's at least a 50% chance that they're being passive-aggressive about the fact that you're playing on your phone and not moving forward to the counter.

[hudebnik]

When I've heard "Can I help you?" from a store employee, it's usually meant "I think you're trying to shoplift; stop it."

[hashiveinu]

I actually saw my first box spring with actual springs in it this year. The mattress/box spring set appeared to be 40-50 years old.

(And was full of pee, thus why it was being given away for free.)

I wonder how long it's been since the author of that page saw an American bed - or if they haven't actually seen one, but figured that "box spring" must mean there were springs in it.

[conuly]

Do modern mattresses even use box springs?

[hashiveinu]

I think most mattresses are sold with something called a "box spring," but it's just a box with no springs. There are some bed frames that say they eliminate the need for a box spring (YMMV on those - the one I have experience with was terrible and fell apart).

[conuly]

Mattress websites assure me that most modern mattresses don't need boxsprings so long as the bed has slats - if it's just a bare frame then you do need something to hold the mattress up.

[glaurung]

Depends on how expensive the mattress set is. “Foundations” (mattress support without springs) are cheaper, but you can still get actual box springs - i own one.

[shadowkat]

Yes, I have a box spring.

And I think my parents got a new box spring about ten years ago.

Provides a higher mattress and more support for the back.

[shewhostaples]

In the UK, 'twin beds' means two single beds in the same room. I have known people trip up over this before when booking hotels etc!

[conuly]

I'll bet they do!

[poliphilo]

Erm, but we do have twin beds. And we call them that. I wouldn't know about mattress sizes though.

[conuly]

Question: When you say "twin bed", what does that refer to?

[cesy]

For me as a Brit, it means two single beds in one room.

[conuly]

In the US, it means "a mattress or bed in the size 'twin'", and from context I think that's what was intended here.

...okay, actually, it was a HP fic, so this is a great opportunity to invent some wild wizard bed terminology. Or, alternatively, wizards don't have standardized bed sizes at all.

[siliconshaman]

Non-standard sizes would make sense. Prior to WW1 (I think) mattresses and beds weren't standardised, and since the wizarding world has a lot of medieval hold-overs and seems to lag behind muggles (function of a wizards longer life-span perhaps? or innate conservatism due to spells being learnt by route and having to be precise) it would follow that standardization never really caught on with them.

[conuly]

function of a wizards longer life-span perhaps?

Probably. This is actually a known problem of a longer life-span + a lower birthrate = the society tends towards conservatism. Add that to their isolationism and... well....

I've long since headcanoned that a. there are more schools than Hogwarts (have to be, to support the society we see) but b. nearly all of them are boarding schools because somebody along the line realized that this is the best way to ensure that first generation students are isolated from their natal communities and socialize "appropriately" into wizarding society, ie, without bringing too many outside ideas with them.

[poliphilo]

So it seems we both have the term, but mean different things by it.

[conuly]

Yes. Why did you think I linked to a page on mattress sizes?

[siliconshaman]

Twin is more often used to refer to two beds, side by side. I think we don't use the term twin to refer to mattresses to avoid confusion and it just kind of fell out of favour. That, and why does anyone need all those different sizes?

"Next", or "Next please", is more or less universal here in the UK. Never heard following or step down. I suspect it's a bit of culture the US borrowed from someplace else European, or is a unique formation.

And yeah, I heard about the alley's (or lack thereof) in NYC, because there's exactly one and it gets used in a lot of Tv shows and movies. After awhile you begin to recognise it, and I wondered why it was so, so I went digging.

[conuly]

I'm not sure that following step down is a US thing so much as a NYC specific thing. The US is a really big place, after all.

That, and why does anyone need all those different sizes?

It's not that you don't have multiple mattress sizes as well.

[hashiveinu]

I've never heard "following" or "step down." I grew up in central NY. I've been to NYC briefly three times in my life.

[adrian_turtle]

why does anyone need all those different sizes?

Because rooms are different sizes. If you have a big room, a big bed is luxurious and comfortable. If you have a small room, a big bed is terribly inconvenient. "Twin" beds can be put on opposite sides of the room for people who aren't sleeping together, or pushed together under a king-sized fitted sheet for people who ARE sleeping together. (Very convenient for Orthodox Jews. Or for a guest room.)

Do you not have different size mattresses at all, or are they sold by dimensions? When I was planning to move into this apartment, I considered getting rid of my queen-sized (60" wide) bed and getting a full-sized (54") bed. We just put all my bookcases in the dining room.

[malinaldarose]

When I was a cashier (back in the late '80s, early '90s), I worked in two different places that didn't have room for proper lines to form, so it was always, "I can help the next person in line," and we left it to the customers to decide who that was. Mostly, they were pretty good about it. (Though I was also pretty good at keeping track of who was next.)

[kengr]

For what it's worth, Spokane (where I grew up) has alleys all over then place. It's unusual for a block *not* to have one.

In the Portland Metro area, it's the other way around. Only place I've seen alleys is in a small area a couple miles from where I now live. and I only know about *those* because I once lived in that neighborhood.

[dewline]

When I lived in places as small as Selkirk and as large as Regina, I got used to alleys. Neighbourhoods of a certain age range in Regina had alleys. For a few decades - from the mid-1970's to the 2010's - they stopped doing that, but the habit's come back for newer developments from the maps and aerial/satellite photography of that city I've seen.

Ottawa doesn't seem to have gotten into that habit, except in a handful of specific neighbourhoods that built them as independent municipalities before being annexed into Ottawa.

[chelseagirl]

THANK YOU about the alley thing. I mentioned, on Facebook, that a historical fiction author (who from his bio lived in Western Canada) locating an alley in a precise location a block from my old apartment in Chelsea, where I lived for 22 years, took me right out of things. And several people got huffy that "it was FICTION."

Sorry, but it's not that hard to do one's research. (On the other hand, because I married a native Londoner, I am now super self-conscious about anything I write set over there.)

I can't ever recall having heard "step down" but now I will listen for it.

[redbird]

Yes it's fiction, but either do the research or fictionalize the entire city, a la Ed McBain's 87th Precinct stories.

I continue to be amused that Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe lived in a brownstone that, from the number, must be in the Hudson River; I'm pretty sure the author knew what he was doing there.

[chelseagirl]

Oh yes -- a lot of the addresses on Law & Order likewise.

[jesuswasbatman]

This might be one of Stout's many Sherlock Holmes references - at the time that Conan Doyle was writing, there was no number in Baker Street as high as "221B", but later the two streets continuing Baker Street to the north, in Conan Doyle's time York Place and Upper Baker Street, were absorbed into Baker Street.

[conuly]

Oh, man.

There's a YA duology that's very clearly set in Tribeca at a slightly ritzy public high school. And obviously they just made up a public school for it, fair enough, except I'm familiar enough with the area to know "Hold on, wait, the only high school this could possibly be is Stuy, and if it were Stuy or a Stuy expy they would have said" so the entire time I read it my brain kept itching.

[conuly]

As for step down, I most recently heard it at the bed bath and beyond in tribeca, the one across the street from battery park city and just around the corner from Stuy. I'd gone into the city to pick up tomatoes and stopped in there to get forks, because all ours had gone missing. That's what reminded me, and what ultimately prompted me to post this!

[redbird]

Also, "alley" means a number of different things, depending on where you are.

Boston has a lot of mid-block "public alleys" behind buildings, which are wide enough not just for pedestrians, but for deliveries and garbage trucks.

I might duck into one of those for a conversation or phone call, if I wanted to be out of other people's way but wasn't worried about secrecy. If i actually wanted not to be noticed, I'd buy a cup of tea or coffee, then sit on a park bench and get out my cell phone--a variant on G. K. Chesterton's "invisible man."

I was startled by the name the first time I saw a street sign saying something like "Public Alley 407," but it's at least as reasonable as having three adjacent streets called 87th Avenue, 87th Road, and 87th Drive, as they do in Queens. We lived on one of those when I was growing up, and ever so often my parents would send me around the block to knock on the same-numbered house on 87th Road and give them mail that had been their mis-delivered mail.

[flemmings]

We have midblock alleys here in downtown Toronto, where houses were built so close together that garages were consigned to the back of the lot. They've started naming the alleys after local people, places, and in one case, a horse that combatted diphtheria.

https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2014/02/15/crestfallen_lane_may_soon_commemorate_piece_of_seaton_village_history.html

[fred_mouse]

Places I've seen those kinds of alleys in Australia, it was for the night soil cart to come and empty the outside toilets. Any suburb modern enough to have started with indoor toilets doesn't seem to have them.

[flemmings]

Which makes sense, but the area I grew up in was built in Edwardian times and didn't have alleys, while my present neighbourhood dates to the 20s and does. I can't think that cars had become so prevalent by then that people needed a garage, but maybe they had.

[fred_mouse]

I think I'd have to do too much research to work out which bits of my city date to Edwardian times, and then work out which were wealthy areas and which were labours 'cottages' to be able to comment on that aspect. But thinking on two areas that I've lived in that could have been 1920s (California bungalows were common, and my understanding of the popularity puts that in the '20s), only one of those had back alleys that I remember, and at least one of the houses I lived in in the other still had a functioning outhouse. So now I'm wondering about my understanding of the alleys!

[foms]

While going through old papers, recently, I found that my dad lived in an apartment on one of those streets, in Queens, when he was a young adult. It took me a bit to get reoriented to that oddity of naming and find the place, using Google Street View.

Another odd event to do with parallel street names is that, a few years ago, I received a letter from the city planning department, where I live. It was addressed to someone else, at my address. A bit of investigation turned up that the person is very wealthy from owning a dozen car dealerships, in this area, and was leading a multibillion-dollar development project, adjacent to down-town. It seemed as though it might be a very important letter. Eventually, I figured out that it wasn't. The city department had messed up an ordinary mail merge. The person's address is the same street and number as mine but in one of the fanciest neighbourhoods of next city over. The postal code was somewhere in the middle of the continent.

[adafrog]

I've never heard of a musical sit/stand cue. Interesting.

[conuly]

Upon reflection, I'm not actually sure that spending an entire assembly learning and practicing this actually saved us time in the long run.

[adafrog]

But it made them feel good to be able to train humans like that.

[fred_mouse]

That is an interesting comparison of mattress sizes, and of course the Australian system has to be a hellish mix of the two. We have singles and king singles (which are just about the same width, but long enough for someone, say, 1.8m tall to be able to not have to curl up on); doubles which used to be the standard for a couple but are now mostly not something I see people acquire unless they have small spaces; queen, which is what I think the average middle-class couple would have. According to the sizing of manchester in the shops, we also have king, but I have no idea on what that is other than 'bigger than a queen'.