Postby Soupspoon » Sun Mar 12, 2017 11:36 pm UTC
Here, we use instead tend to use "rubbish" (general waste, of various grades) and "litter" (light waste, mostly handy-sized food packaging discards, where it shouldn't be1). I get the impression that "garbage ≈ rubbish" and "trash ≈ litter", but much as I'm probably grossly simplifying my assessment of the British English terms, I might be making assumptions regarding the American English ones, and the food-waste (rather than crisp(/chip) packet littering waste) distinction might well apply.
I would (locally) perhaps use the word "trash" mostly for "trash talking" or "the car was trashed" (UK equivs might be "talking bad" and "the car was (badly damaged/totally ruined)"?) and the word "garbage" for "the whole plan was garbage" ("...was rubbish/awful"), in both cases being obvious imports of the US usages in popular media.
Then there's "junk", which tends to be bulk scrap (or ought-to-be-scrapped) items, and it takes a bit of transatlantic reuse to talk about the "junk in the trunk" (unless the storage box in the spare room is full of broken toasters, surplus brass door handles and assorted unwanted fireplace poker stands that haven't been used since the house was converted to gas2) or the man's junk that he (sort of) displays in his budgie-smugglers. Are your junkyards called scrapyards, or am I mixing up which side of the mid-Atlantic ridge these words are coming from, again?
Also, over here we (at least until they became "wheelie bins") put our rubbish in dustbins ("bin" for short, also used more aptly for the "garbage pail" in the kitchen and the "trashcan" under your desk in the office), for the dustbinmen to heave into the dustbin lorry3. This is because they were primarily for the removal of the household's ashes from the (coal) fires, even though they were long ago overwhelmingly dominated by other household wastes, that either didn't used to exist (plastic packaging) or were disposed of elsewhere (food waste onto the compost heap, or even to feed the pig, etc). Now there's very little ash (possibly that's going onto garden plots, more, from wood-burning stoves that are becoming fashionable) and if your council doesn't give you at least three different colours of wheelie bin (to be collected at various frequencies) they are obviously behind the times.
(Then you also put into your own car boot (US: "junk in the trunk", again) the rest of the junk and other bulk items that you don't have a handily imminent collection for, to take to the municipal dumpit site. These used to just be tips, but now they're a collection of skips handily labelled so that you can personally unload your car straight into the appropriate one for green garden waste, wood/chipboard, cardboard, metal, large electrical items (not covered elsewhere!), small electrical items (not covered elsewhere), plastic, clothes/shoes, glass, cans (Al/Fe), car oil, cooking oil, batteries (vehicle ones separate from the others!), televisions, fridges/freezers, soil/rubble, cardboard drinks cartons or fluorescent tubes, as appropriate. All of that I would potentially call "rubbish"/garbage-equivalent, if not "junk"/scrap, but very little of it would be strictly "litter"/trash-equivalent, as long as the council staff aren't neglecting their duty to keep the stream of citizen-disposers in line and sufficiently motivated to not mess the place up.)
1 Or in the bins specifically for litter, where it is "litter that isn't (currently) littering".
2 Gaseous gas, not car-fuel gas. Dunno if you use that term or propane or whatever. BYGTI.
3 Once the binmen used to come and fetch your bin from round the back/side of your house, heave it on their shoulder to the binlorry and then take it back again. These days, the householder is expected to wheel their wheeliebin to the kerb (or get someone else to do it for them) the night before collection, for the binmen to more easily get them to the binlorry's lifting mechanism to upend the bin into its ravening maw, then you later trundle it back to wherever you stow it the rest of the week/fortnight/month. The partial exception to this is where the municipal bins ("the bins") for a housing block, school or block of shops/offices is "on the kerbside", but that's not universal, and you can still see shop staff trundling the heavy-duty "a family of tramps could sleep in one" rubbish bins/dumpsters out from the staff gateway onto the street, or back again, one side or other of the business-wastecollections day.
