On 2004-10-23, Sherry wrote:

Here, a basement (hardly anyone has one)...is the room under your house. A
cellar is a tornado shelter, which is completley separate from the house. Also
called a "scare-hole."

Cellars also come in fruit, root and coal. The fruit is in jars
on shelves. The roots are mounded up in straw. The coal is loose.
You have cellar doors that slope.

Some old words have disappeared, such as ash can, because noone burns
coal any more to make ashes to be hauled away.

American English is different owing to many years of separation and
influences from the languages of the other settlers of the New World, the
Indians who were here first, and the African slaves. Thus we kept the
definite article in phrases like "in the hospital" and lost the initial
"h" in "herb". Old timers would say "yarbs", I guess from the Spanish
"la yerba", but that has died out. "Yarb" might have come in with the
Mexican War. It always meant medicinal plants such as wild ginseng and
not garden herbs.