Hi Haogide.

Listen to the boss! ~L~
No one can possibly know everything, and that's certainly not a reason for feeling stupid.
None of us will ever know everything, but we all keep learning new things in the forums daily.

I agree with you, the forums rock!

Miriam

One interesting new teacher is Google. If you want to find out if a phrase is being used in the way you're using it, just type it into google in quotation marks, as in "sweets and ices." If the phrase is widely used, as this one is, then you'll get many hits. If you want to test whether an alternative phrase is better or more correct, try the same thing. All mistakes are present in large numbers on Google, but the correct form, or at least the normally used form, is usually more than 10X more common.

It turns out that "ices" is indeed proper British dialect for "kinds of ice cream" or "ice cream treats." Here is an excerpt from one of my top Google hits:

Headline: "Sweets and ices of long ago - The magic tastes of childhood are recalled"

IT had been the unofficial tuck shop for thousands of schoolchildren for decades. When the splendid sweetshop at 106 Widemarsh Street, Hereford, closed in 1964 it is to be hoped the news was broken gently to the boys and girls.

It was the end of a delicious era. No more would youngsters be able to squeeze into the little shop and slowly swivel 180 degrees and gaze wide-eyed at the goodies on offer. Pulling down the shutters in March 1964 for the last time were Mr and Mrs William King who had owned the shop for 40 years, having moved there from Abergavenny shortly after their marriage in 1923. Their business was a boon to the pupils at the nearby High School for Boys and High School for Girls, the latter becoming the Bluecoat School.


Really makes you want to go out for ices, doesn't it?