"Make from scratch" - British vs. American?

I did set off reading the Pinter on the assumption that you'd made it up yourself. But then I remembered how difficult it is to write a good parody of Pinter when he does it so well himself.

Although "The kettle wants boiling" is rather local usage, "He's wants a good spanking" and "He's asking for good spanking" or even just "He's asking for it" are of much wider usage. There is a difference: in the spanking cases there is a sense that one thing will inevitably lead to another, which is therefore a subconscious request, whereas kettles never make any kind of request subconscious or otherwise.

I definitely 'put the kettle on' every day, or sometimes 'boil the jug'. Electric kettles used to be called electric jugs here back in my youth when they were ceramic, and not made of aluminium or plastic.

I think of "want" for "need" as north of England, maybe specifically Yorkshire. My grandmother used to say "He wants a good spanking," which of course was the last thing I wanted.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

That's about 200 years old. Vinny is correct that "want" is not so commonly used to mean, quite plainly, "lacks" or "needs", without any connotation of "wishes for", these days.

I have an annotated Pride & Prejudice. The editor annotates every instance of "want" in that sense, on the assumption that the reader won't be familiar with it.

Some dictionaries call that usage "archaic;" others make no such distinction. Merriam Webster gives "the motor wants a tune-up' as an example.

"Want" is such a common word that it's hard to construct a query to look at dialect surveys.

I still sometimes use wants for needs the usage learned from my Yorkshire grandfather. I can remember discussing the usage with him in the 1960ties.

The editor annotates every instance of "want" in that sense, on the assumption that the reader won't be familiar with it.

Every instance?? The editor must assume her readership is obtuse...especially as the first instance is surely one of the most famous sentences in English literature, and that sense of want still appears in most dictionaries.

(In my experience, annotators of 19th C. classics spend far more time stating the obvious than elucidating the genuinely opaque / forgotten.)

Every instance?? The editor must assume her readership is obtuse

That is deliberate on the part of the annotator, who does the same thing for other terms. As mentioned in the introduction, the book is designed to be used as reference, not necessary as a straight through read, therefore a number of annotations are repeated.

I learned a heck of a lot from this particular annotation--especially about the British class system of the time, (the nuances of which gave me a greater understanding of a lot of the book) and why the Bennet girls really would be destitute if their father died. Not to mention a bunch of words that have changed meaning since then.

That's "to be in want of", nutrax. Not an expression of grandmother's, as far as I can recall. "Want" the noun has quite a different range of meanings from the verb. Think of FDR's freedom from want.

And at any rate, the truth universally acknowledged may include an implication that the gentleman almost consciously desires a wife, or would if he were smart enough to realize it . Not at all the same as "he wants (needs, would benefit from) a good spanking."

In my experience, annotators of 19th C. classics spend far more time stating the obvious than elucidating the genuinely opaque / forgotten.

This is sadly the case with but a few noted exceptions. i expect the publishers are sufficiently ignorant they don't notice. Or else are content to pay someone a pittance to someone to give the appearance of an annotation.