M is for More - R is for Rubbers!

I've been rather too addicted to 'Reels' since Facebook started posting them on our feeds about six-months/a year (?) ago, and one of the common themes seems to be younger Brit's and Americans comparing each other's food, language and culture, often disparagingly, or at least comically, and one of the words which keeps coming up is 'rubber' for eraser.

 

Now, I deliberately chose to use the word 'eraser', from the off, and as the Tag, back at the start of the blog, or when I first covered them, as even if you're not chasing clicks, it behoves you to at least help the search-bots, which are, in the English language, mostly American in origin or location. But yes, we use rubber in everyday lingo.

 

And the various European forms of Spanish 'goma', the French 'caoutchouc' (cow chew!) or German 'gummi', all refer to rubber, as in the latex from rubber trees, while the word erase belongs in the group of words that includes destroy, obliterate, as in to wipe out or cancel. Although the fact that in Hollywood movies, the mafia are often rubbing people out, suggests that the connection is there, and that American English has evolved away from English, and 'rubber', with the adoption of 'eraser'?

 

I'm not sure that we've learnt anything there, or prevented future giggling on dreadful teenage influencer's Tick-Tock's or Instagram's, either side of the pond, but I've got a substantial intro', without much effort! As a follow-up to the eraser's seen in the 'London loot' post yesterday, here's a few more which have come in recently.

 

These are by Rex London, who we've seen before, and I can't remember where I got them now, but it was only a few weeks ago? more Iwako knock-offs, and more marine subjects, the whale with the fountain-spurt found in yesterday's Symex set is here, but the others are a bit more toward the realistic than the cartoony?

 

We did look at some of these in a previous post too, with their little black plastic eyes, and I wonder how may of them ever actually get used as rubbers, the bulk just building as a combined weight of collected novelties on the planet's surface, with the occasional clear-out sending some to landfill?

Dinorasers! We have seen these sculpts in WHSmith packaging before, but I think we have new colours/shades in this set, which is branded to i-doodle, one of the in-house brands of The Range, for their stationary lines, suggesting a third party contract-manufacture for both lots, and further brandings likely, away from these shores!

50p in a British Heart Foundation charity shop here, fundraisers for the RNLI (Royal National Lifeboat Institution), another charity, and a flat lifeboatman was the attraction! There have been quite a few lifeboatmen figurines, and other relevant items from the RNLI, over the years, and they will get a page on the A-Z's one day, as I have several flyers of their fundraising items.

As an addendum, because I also chose to set my PC to proper English, every use of eraser above, has a blue line under it asking me if I want to switch spellchecker to American-English! And yes, we use the other 'rubber' too! Although there, the nationalism switches to our 'Auld' enemy', where we also call them French Letters, and they call them English Overcoats!