When I think of candy it’s these hard sugary sweets that come to mid, as opposed to the Mars bars, Snickers, Milky Ways et al, which are never referred to as candies here.

Other Americans can check my usage to ensure this is not just my personal quirk, but in my experience in Leftpondia candy, as a mass noun, can include chocolates, Snickers, etc. As in: “I got a lot of Halloween candy this year.” Or “Would you like some candy?”

But when used as an individual noun and in plural, it always refers to hard-boiled sweets. As in: “Would you like a candy?” Or “I ate three candies.”

Agreed. Now where is that candy bar I bought?

ElizaD: “We still have candy floss in the north of England as they do in South Africa.”

ElizaD, A South African friend says the Afrikaans folk down there call Candy Floss “Spookasem,” which apparently means “ghost-breath.” You familiar with that?

“Spookasem,” which apparently means “ghost-breath.”

I like that!  It’s been decades since I outgrew my taste for cotton candy, but that’s a great name for it.

ElizaD: “We still have candy floss in the north of England as they do in South Africa.”

ElizaD, A South African friend says the Afrikaans folk down there call Candy Floss “Spookasem,” which apparently means “ghost-breath.” You familiar with that?

No, but it seems to be the Afrikaans name for it.  English speakers just called it plain old candy floss.

Nobody’s yet come up with an answer to my question about the origin of the song title “Big Rock Candy Mountain”.  Is it drug-related?

Erasing duplicated post

ElizaD, perhaps this site will help answer your question. It takes a while to download (on my antiquated set-up anyway!).  Towards the end it claims that BRCM is not drug-related.

http://www.billcasselman.com/canadian_food_words/cfw_thirteen_cocagne.htm

Is it drug-related?

In 1897?

Sure, in 1897.  Folks were doing dope even earlier than that.  The composer Berlioz was addicted to Laudenum(sic), a morphine dirivative, as were thousands of people over the period of it’s existence.  Of course, “rock” as drug lingo is fairly new, so I would agree that BRCM isn’t a stoner tune.

Whitefang

In 1897?

Not such an unreasonable question, given, as whitefang has just said, that drugs have been around for ever and been given various names.  As just one example, in the nineteenth century

Opium was known as a “mother’s mercy” as well as a “mother’s minder”

But it seems that in this case the Big Rock Candy Mountain is just a place name.  Great links, skibberoo!  Thanks.

Eliza, about that song you linked in your first post, I’m a bit puzzled about that last line; But go on out and moer all the outjies next door. Does ‘moer’ mean ‘kill’ here?

Oh, and we call the fluffy stuff ‘suikerspin’ (’spun sugar’). Sweets, hard or soft are called ‘snoep’. That would include licorice and chocolate. This BTW is also the origin of the American English ‘snoop’.

‘Kandij’ is what we call rock sugar.

Moera (usually there’s an a on the end) means beat up, kill.  I don’t know the origin - maybe from “murder”?

My guess it’s from Dutch ‘moeren’ which means ‘to break, destroy’. Occasionally it is also used in a sense of ‘kill’. I’m wondering if the original meaning may have been ‘to kill’ and that the sense of ‘to destroy’ is derived from that. It might be related to French ‘mourir’. Just guessing here.

Strange that WNT doesn’t seem to know it. I heard it before and thought it was used only in Noord-Hollands dialect. Remarkable it made its way to Afrikaans then.

Eliza, please could you also enlighten me as to what “outjies” are.

If Eliza doesn’t mind, I’ll take this one, so that I can sign off and go to bed.
‘Outjies’ means ‘old folks’ (cf. Dutch ‘oudjes’).