c
SQUEAMISH (NORTHERN ENGLAND, particularly the North-East)
For a word that means unsaleable fish to make the jump from the market stall to the world of the emotions seems something of a stretch. But stretched it is, for caffy, also chaffy, comes from caff/chaff, a word that has meant ‘the husks of oats’ since the tenth century (and still does in the North and the Midlands). By extension caff became anything seen as worthless or figuratively light, including rotten or at least unsaleable fish, as well as rubbish of any kind. Finally we come to caffy-hearted, which followed this trail and which came to mean one whose heart is light – not in the sense of cheerful, but in that of lacking gravitas or weight. Hence the Teesside definition: ‘squeamish’.
something worthless or rubbishy (Lancashire and Yorkshire)
Cag-mag began life in the eighteenth century as a term to describe a tough old goose, and from there came to mean ‘unwholesome or even rotten meat’. In that pre-foodie world, such geese, which came from the North and Midlands (the word apparently first emerged in Lincolnshire) were frequently dumped on the undiscriminating London market. Today, the culinary uses seem to have disappeared but both dialect (as a ‘gossip’, a ‘meddlesome old woman’, a ‘practical joke’ or ‘mischief’, and as a verb, ‘to nag’) and slang (in the UK as ‘rubbish’ or ‘odds and ends’, and in Australia ‘idle chatter’) have kept the word alive and well.
As befits an activity that we all spend so much time doing, there is an apparently unceasing list of words describing either the act of gossiping or a person who engages in it. In fact, very few of these lie outside of two main categories. First, there are those words that refer to the chatting or prattling on that is usually how gossip changes hands. These range from fairly obvious formations like chatterbag in the South-West, gabber in Berkshire and natterer in Sussex to the more colourful (and clearly related) chamragging in Wiltshire and hamchammering in Somerset. The second category is made up of words that refer to the function of gossip in exchanging news and information such as newsing, and newsbagging, which can still be found in the South-West. Examples with more explicitly negative connotations, such as scandalmonger in the South-East and taler in Dorset, could also be included here. Among those that don’t fit these tendencies are clonc in west Wales, which is derived from the Welsh cloncian, ‘to gossip’, and the very odd but nice gallivanter in Cheshire.
And that’s not all. There is blatherskite (Durham), cag-mag (Gloucestershire, Sussex), call (Yorkshire), caller (Yorkshire, Lincolnshire), canter (south-west Midlands), chatterbox (various bits of the South), chattermag (South-West), chopse (Berkshire, Staffordshire, Gwent), clat (Lancashire), clat-can (Lancashire), gad (Yorkshire), gallivanter (Cheshire), gasbag (Berkshire, Shropshire), houser (Cornwall), jaffock (Lancashire), housing (Cornwall), labbing (South Wales), magger (Gloucestershire), magging (Yorkshire), natter (Oxfordshire), nattering (South, esp. South-East), news-bag (chiefly South-West), news-canter (Gloucestershire), newser (South-West), newsmonger (South, esp. South-West), newsmongerer (Devon), newsmongering (Somerset), newspad (Wiltshire), nosey parker, rattlebox, (chiefly South-East), tattler (Essex), tick-tatting (Norfolk), tongue-wag (Worcestershire), yaddering (Cumbria); yapper (Essex).
The very word ‘gossip’, by the way, has an interesting origin in itself. In Old English godsib was the word for a godparent. It meant, literally, ‘a person related to one God’, and came from god ‘God’ and sib a ‘relative’ (this still survives in the word sibling). Gossip came over time to be applied to a close friend, particularly a female one, who was invited to be present at the birth of a child. Linguistic evolution is a strange thing, for at some point that same woman took on the negative aspects of a newsmonger or tattler, indulging in light and trifling chatter.
See also CANK, CANT, CHAMRAG, CLISH-MA-CLAVER, COOSE, JAFFOCK, JANGLE, NEIGHBOUR, PROSS, TALE-PYET
The origins of cag-mag remain unproven. The mid-nineteenth-century slang collector John Camden Hotten suggested a corruption of the Greek kakos mageiros, a ‘bad cook’, and attributed it to university slang. Most etymologists reluctantly say no to that, even if no alternative has surfaced, although there may be some connection between the dialect verb cag, meaning ‘to gossip’, and our standard verb cackle, whether as a goose or a human. We do know that a mag was once a gossip or a scold and was a shortening of magpie, a notorious chatterbox of a bird.
a gossip (the Midlands, chiefly south-west)
Formerly recorded as a verb throughout the Midlands (except Lincolnshire), cank has also been used as a noun (denoting both a person who gossips and the act of gossiping itself) chiefly in the south-western part of the region. It is still recorded in at least Warwickshire. The sense of idle chatter is an extension of a meaning of cank, recorded in the same region in the mid-eighteenth century, to mean the honking of a goose (chosen for its onomatopœia).
See ALL THE LOCAL GOSSIP, above, and also CANT, CHAMRAG, CLISH-MA-CLAVER, COOSE, JAFFOCK, JANGLE, NEIGHBOUR, PROSS, TALE-PYET
nice; good (Northumbria)
Canny, like its Scottish counterpart meaning ‘sensible’ or ‘wise’, may derive from the verb ‘can’. It is used all over Northumbria as a multi-purpose intensifier, such as in the strange combination overheard in the conversation of local teenagers who declared a new download to be ‘canny wicked’ a phrase in which the language of two generations collide.
a gossip (south-west Midlands and south-east Wales)
Cant may be a variant of cank or simply an imitative formation in its own right. It typically occurs slightly further south-west than cank, and follows the same pattern of a noun deriving from an earlier verb and gradually becoming by far the most common form of it. Canter is also found in the south-west Midlands and canting in Newfoundland. That it crops up in Canada is not as surprising as it might appear, since the dialect of south-west England is one of the most important historic sources of Newfoundland English.
See ALL THE LOCAL GOSSIP, and also CANK, CHAMRAG, CLISH-MA-CLAVER, COOSE, JAFFOCK, JANGLE, NEIGHBOUR, PROSS, TALE-PYET
toilet; an unappealing place (London and now UK-wide)
Carsey, otherwise spelt carsi, cawsy, karsey, karzey, karzi, karzie, karzy, kazi, khazi and kharzi, comes from the Italian casa, ‘a place’, and has meant ‘a lavatory’ since the late nineteenth century. Indeed, it means anywhere the speaker dislikes, whether a brothel or a thieves’ den, or a place that may not literally be one, but that resembles a lavatory: in other words one that is messy, dirty and unappealing. About the only respite was around the 1880s when for a while carsey meant just a house or pub, with no negative overtones at all.
terrible; appalling (Northern Ireland)
Surely to be ranked among the strangest of all dialect terms, cat melodeon is an expression that in Northern Ireland immediately rings alarm bells. For a term so colourful it is surprising – and hugely frustrating – that its origin is so elusive. That hasn’t stopped people from trying, though. Among suggestions and local myths is the supposed tendency of accordion (or melodeon) players to fluff their notes, which can reproduce the terrible howling of a cat on heat. An alternative, and perhaps more lexically feasible, theory links the term to a slang use of cat to mean ‘terrible’ or ‘shocking’, or to the Irish term cat marbh which means ‘mischief’ or ‘calamity’. Finally, there is a suggestion that the term may simply be an abbreviation of the noun ‘catastrophe’. Whichever of these it may be, or another as yet uncovered, the term lives on as a vivid illustration of just how vibrant dialect can be.
changeable (of weather) (Devon and the South-West)
To rush to the lavatory is to be ‘caught short’, and the kind of weather that is catchy, at least in Devon, is the sort that will catch you equally unawares, albeit this time in the middle of a field without shelter. Catchy thus means that the weather is changeable, usually showery, and catching-time is that wet season – presumably that of April showers – in which people working in the fields are caught by frequent downpours.
How to talk like … a Scouser
The sound of the Mersey is unlike any other in Britain. It’s also perhaps the best-known British accent the world over as a result of a certain bunch of young musicians from Liverpool who made it big in the 1960s and whose relatively gentle and genteel variety of Scouse became a model for all young people to admire. As a result of the Beatles and others, the Mersey was no longer just a river, but de MAIRzee, across which you took a ferry. We learned too about Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields and became familiar with that drone-like tune of Liverpudlian English, with its curvy upward inflections and breathy word-ends.
For a British accent that attracted so much celebrity around the world (how often have you heard, say, a Bristol or a Birmingham voice making waves on the legendary American Ed Sullivan TV show as Scouse did when the Beatles visited in 1964?), it’s surprising that the speech of Merseyside and Liverpool in particular regularly comes near the bottom in surveys of favourite British accents. It has its negative associations, of course, of lazy scallies on the fiddle, of dock strikes and dodgy town-hall deals. But today the sound of 2008’s capital of culture should be riding high once more.
They say the term ‘Scouse’ derived from an old fisherman’s stew called ‘lobscouse’ and that the term originated in Norway, but the accent has nothing of the fiords to it and owes much of its bedrock to the Irish speech of the area’s many settlers from the west. Very different too, this Liverpool speech, from the sound of ‘Lanky’ talk, the accent of Lancashire in which county Liverpool nominally finds itself, but with which it has little or nothing in common in terms of accent. Only on the Mersey do you hear those trailing ends-of-words with hard consonants like ‘k’ and ‘g’ that sound as though the speaker’s got a mouthful of phlegm. Here a book becomes a ‘booCH’ (with the final sound like a Scottish loch), crack (as in ‘good crack’ or fun, from the Irish craic) is ‘crACH’, and that supposedly routine Liverpool tag, wack, for a bloke (from Gaelic mhac) comes out as ‘waCH’.
And still listening closely to the way a Liverpudlian ends his words, unless you’re familiar with it, the fade-away to a hiatus that you hear as he pauses to consider the rest of his utterance: ‘but …’ which trails off to ‘booohh … on the oother hand …’ comes as a surprise. Likewise, that familiar Mersey lad becomes for locals a ‘laahh’, and words ending in ‘t’ also soften towards a ‘th’ sound (fit becomes ‘fith …’).
And Liverpool’s idiosyncratic vowels are typically among the really distinctive British accents, a complete shift-around from Received Pronunciation. So, burn sounds like ‘bairn’ and, as I’ve mentioned, the Mersey is the ‘mairzee’. On the other hand, that very sound ‘air’ that normally turns up in pair, dare and care becomes in the mouth of a Scouser ‘urr’; thus ‘purr’, ‘durr’ and ‘curr’. The short ‘o’ vowel that crops up in words like horrible and lot of can harshen towards ‘harrible’ and ‘larra’, while long ‘u’ is famously never ‘oo’ (as in school) but ‘yew’. So the city’s very name is ‘Liverpyule’, where the Beatles went to ‘skyule’ and later wrote the ‘The Fyule on the Hill’.
The consonant ‘r’ is quite pronounced – verbal is ‘vairrbal’ – but where in other parts of the country (particularly the South-West and in the rest of Lancashire) there is strong rhoticity, or r-sounding (‘haRRk that baRRk!’), in Liverpool it’s not sounded at all. But perhaps the most surprising and indelibly Scouse vowel is the regular tendency to turn the long ‘o’ sound (in phone, home and rolled gold) into something that sounds suddenly very posh. So you can be listening to the ‘rolling gales of Mersey’ dialect pouring forth in your average Birkenhead boozer and suddenly it lurches into something straight out of a cut-glass elocution lesson, as that ‘o’ becomes the triphthong (three-sound) ‘eyo’. So a conversation about bling, say, that asserted that someone had a rolled gold phone at home would sound something akin to ‘reolled geold pheone at heome’. You’d hardly credit it, wack!
So there was this scally (reprobate), see, who was sagging skewl (bunking off) because he didn’t want to see the nitty nora (school nurse). But he was made up (very pleased) to discover his teacher got kaylied (drunk) the night before and gave the bootle buck (battleaxe) a kirby kiss (head-butt) near the lanny (landing stage or pierhead).
SIMON ELMES
close friend (Devon)
The Latin word quattuor means ‘four’, as in a rectangle with its four corners, and it is this that is at the heart of many words that include the dialect version of the Latin, cater, and that usually have the sense of something off at an angle or out of line. Cater-cornered means ‘placed diagonally’, to cater-snozzle is ‘to make an angle’, cater-de-flamp means ‘all askew’, cater-slant is ‘out of shape’, while caterswish, -witch and -ways all mean ‘from side to side’, such as when weaving drunkenly down a road.
It is from these wonderful beginnings that Devon’s catercousin is likely to have developed, denoting one who is a friend, but not exactly a relation.
See also BLOOD, BREDREN, BUTTY, CHUCK, CLICK, CREW, HOMIE, MARRA, MUCKER, SORRY
to mash; to crush (Scotland)
Champ, which is still alive and kicking, is also heard as chamble and is probably closely connected with jam and jamble, both of which mean to crush or squeeze violently. Hence champing can be the noisy grinding of teeth.
to gossip (Wiltshire)
Cham, from champ, is another term for chew that is still to be found in Oxfordshire and the Isle of Wight, while rag, which may well have links to various Scandinavian terms meaning ‘shagginess’ or ‘a strip of fur’, was once a word for the tongue. Thus chamrag, a synonym for chatter, and indeed a literal equivalent to slang’s ‘chew the rag’.
See ALL THE LOCAL GOSSIP, and also CANK, CANT, CLISH-MA-CLAVER, COOSE, JAFFOCK, JANGLE, NEIGHBOUR, PROSS, TALE-PYET
a young person in trendy clothes and flashy jewellery (Cumbria, Liverpool and throughout the North-East)
Charvers are the chavs of the North-East. Charver (sometimes charva), was once used in Cumbria and Liverpool as a simple and affectionate term for a child, probably drawing on a Romany word chavi meaning just that. In the mid-1990s, however, it emerged in the North-East of Britain, from Middlesborough to the Scottish border at Berwick, as a term for a young working-class person, especially a woman, who wears cheap imitations of designer clothes and jewellery and who behaves in a loud, brash or loutish manner. Female charvers are often alternatively known as charvas or kappa slappers, which originated in Newcastle. Their male counterparts are known as neds, a modern sociological label similar to chavs. The characters Sandra and Tracy, the ‘Fat Slags’ in Viz magazine, are caricatures of charvers.
This sense of the word may (although this is as yet unproven) come from another Romany term charver, which means ‘to have sex with’: charver and kappa slapper both have clear sexual connotations, and indeed charver has also been used to refer specifically to a prostitute.
The following quote from the Guardian captures the prevailing image of the charver/charva: ‘After dark, you can get twenty or so charvas loitering in the city’s subway, drinking bottles of cider and shouting abuse at anyone who dares to challenge their territory, while spraying “Sarah is a slag” on the wall.’
See THE CHAVS AND THE CHAV-NOTS, and also CHAV, JANNER, KAPPA SLAPPER, NED, PIKEY, SCALLY, TROBO
a young person in trendy clothes and flashy jewellery (UK-wide, originally the South-East)
Chav may be the most controversial word in Britain of the past decade. The word was the first to reach national prominence from a whole list coined to describe the cultural phenomenon of young working-class people dressing in designer sportswear and flashy jewellery. It became shorthand for the phenomenon as a whole, and the focus of a considerable amount of state-of-the-nation chatter. What few realised when it exploded onto the scene in 2004 was that, far from being coined for our age, it had been around for over 150 years. It derives either from a Romany word meaning ‘child’, or a different Romany word meaning ‘young male’. That means that, linguistically speaking, chavs can trace their origins back to ancient Sanskrit.
It is often said that chav is a contraction of Chatham, the place where ‘chav culture’ first began. The Oxford English Dictionary describes this theory as ‘probably a later rationalization’, but the common use of townie as a synonym in various parts of the country, and parallel words like janner and trobo, suggest that the name of Chatham may well have been an important secondary influence on the choice of the term chav.
Whatever its precise origin, it is likely that the history of chav is closely linked to charver, another word which has the same dual applications, one benign, the other derogatory.
See THE CHAVS AND THE CHAV-NOTS, and also CHARVER, JANNER, KAPPA SLAPPER, NED, PIKEY, SCALLY, TROBO
‘City centres aren’t safe any more. It’s because of the …’ One of the hottest linguistic debates of recent years is whether the words that typically complete a sentence like that are inherently class-prejudiced. That’s a difficult question, but what is undeniable about these words, which denote young people wearing designer sportswear and ostentatious jewellery, is that they generally follow a pattern where the lack of a standard word for an observable cultural phenomenon causes a proliferation of ‘bottom up’ terms for it, which in turn gives rise to regional variety. Both chav and charver are first recorded in local Internet newsgroups, while the earlier ned crops up in a dialect story. They are joined by the bazza or fly boy (North-East), a gudgeon (presumably another instance of using fish to mean ‘stupid’ or ‘gullible’), a hood (Northern Ireland), a nob, ratboy, skanger, steek, stig or townie (Lancashire and further afield), and the trev and yarco (Great Yarmouth).
See also CHARVER, CHAV, JANNER, KAPPA SLAPPER, NED, PIKEY, SCALLY, TROBO
child (Scotland, north of England and the South-West)
Recorded in Scotland from the sixteenth century, and subsequently in Cumbria and Northumberland, chiel is really nothing more than a regional pronunciation of ‘child’. This straightforward origin probably accounts for its usage much further south, namely in Dorset, Devon and Cornwall (see babby). In Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, it is said of the young Bathsheba Everdene that she ‘was not at all a pretty chiel at that time’.
See SMALL TALK, and also BABBY, BAIRN, WEAN
whooping cough (the Midlands, especially Birmingham)
In Proper Brummie, their fascinating collection of Birmingham words and phrases, Carl Chinn and Steve Thorne relate that, according to an ancient Midlands superstition, chin-cough can be cured if the afflicted child is taken out before sunrise on three consecutive mornings, and passed under and over a briar bush nine times. There were more worrying cures proposed elsewhere, including, in Warwickshire, the swallowing of a roasted mouse and, in Birmingham, taking children to gas-works to breathe in the air.
friend (northern England and Scotland)
Chuck and the term of endearment chuckie are likely to be corruptions of ‘chicken’. Shakespeare was one of the first users of chuck in Love’s Labour’s Lost (‘the King would have me present the princess, sweet chuck, with some delightful ostentation’).
See also BLOOD, BREDREN, BUTTY, CATERCOUSIN, CLICK, CREW, HOMIE, MARRA, MUCKER, SORRY
pleased; satisfied (the North and Midlands)
Chuffed is generally defined as meaning happy. It has long been common in Yorkshire and Herefordshire, but it is now popular everywhere and has been since its first appearance in the middle of the twentieth century when it probably originated in the military. It is the ghost or relic of chuff, a seventeenth-century adjective in the North and Midlands meaning ‘swollen’ or ‘chubby’ – originally with literal fat but eventually with emotion. This in turn goes back to the largely obsolete sixteenth-century term chuff, which still survives in Cornwall. A chuff was ‘a cheek swollen or puffed with fat and, by extension, the muzzle of beasts’ (according to the Oxford English Dictionary) but for that, sadly, no origin seems to have been discovered.
One Yorkshire glossary of 1876 even gives a couple of meaningless similes whose very existence proves that the word was extremely common, because it clearly assumed the meaning would be understood in spite of their unhelpfulness: ‘as chuff as cheese’ and ‘as chuff as an apple’ (perhaps these expressions were used to mean ‘swollen with pride or conceited’).
woodlouse (north Devon)
The chuggypig, and its companion the nisseldraft, are both fine examples of the ability of dialect to come up with charming names for what some might feel were less than wholly appealing creatures. Both terms denote a woodlouse, while the former has also been the runt of a litter of pigs as well as being used sometimes as a teasing term of affection. As one Devonian blogger put it recently, ‘I baint laughed so much in yers, watch out for thuk chuggypig yer gert mump-aid.’
The humble woodlouse seems to inspire a number of names, including cheesy bob and, in the US, the pill bug. As regards its origins, chuggypig is linked to chug, ‘to tug as a suckling child at the breast’ (which may in turn link to slang’s chug-a-lug and to chug down meaning to gulp down a drink). The nisseldraft’s roots are more challenging, but probably tie into our standard terms nestle or nestling. Certainly the image of the woodlouse as a suckling babe is consistent – perhaps not an image for the squeamish.
hungry (Midlands, south Lancashire and south Yorkshire)
Clammed is probably an extended use of clam, a dialect variant of clamp with senses such as ‘pinch’, ‘press’, ‘seize with force’. At the beginning of the twentieth century, it was recorded almost throughout England, but is now centred on the Midlands, especially the East.
See LEERY FOR LUNCH?, and also CLEMT, HUNGERED, LEER/LEERY, YAP
a meat pasty (Lincolnshire)
mud (Scotland and the North-East)
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, clart – which means ‘sticky or claggy dirt’ – is a very old word. It can be found, at least as beclart, ‘covered in muck’, as early as the thirteenth century. Thereafter it seems to have flown beneath the radar until the early nineteenth century when it re-emerged in Scotland as a term which extends beyond the muck itself to mean ‘a dirty person’, or ‘a cheap and nasty thing’. It has subsequently spread as far south as the North-East, where it has the added development of hypocritical talk or flattery.
See MUD, MUD, GLORIOUS MUD, and also PLODGE, SLOB, SLUB, SLUCH
hungry (Lancashire)
Clemt is a phonetic variation of clemmed, which in turn replicates clammed, a word that goes back to ‘clam’ and alludes to that particular bivalve’s squeezing properties. It is a popular dialect term, with multiple meanings: ‘to choke or be parched with thirst’, ‘to benumb with cold’ and – as the noun clem – slow starvation. The clemming house, meanwhile, is where the butcher puts animals to starve prior to killing them. The wonderfully pithy clemgut or clem vengeance, meanwhile (reminiscent of slang’s belly-vengeance for sour beer), is second-rate food. Finally (although the compounds go on and on), to be clem-gutted is to be ravenous.
See LEERY FOR LUNCH?, and also CLAMMED, HUNGERED, LEER/LEERY, THIRL, YAP
gang of friends (UK-wide but particularly London)
Click, like clique, is thought to come from a clicking sound, and so the noise made by a group of people. Although very much a part of rap lyrics of the past decade or so, click amazingly goes back to the early nineteenth century. The OED’s first record of it is from 1822 with the sense of a narrow coterie or circle; a century later J. B. Priestley was writing, ‘Local fellers, they was, all in a click, y’know, a gang.’
See also BLOOD, BREDREN, BUTTY, CATERCOUSIN, CHUCK, CREW, HOMIE, MARRA, MUCKER, SORRY
gossip (Scotland and Ulster)
This Scots and Ulster word for gossip is a bit of a tautology: it is based on clish or cleesh, meaning to repeat an idle story, plus claver, which itself means an idle or pointless story or a piece of gossip. The duplication hardly matters though, such is the alliterative power of the term.
See ALL THE LOCAL GOSSIP, and also CANK, CANT, CHAMRAG, COOSE, JAFFOCK, JANGLE, NEIGHBOUR, PROSS, TALE-PYET
a snack, usually taken mid-morning (Staffordshire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Warwickshire)
Specifically referring to a mid-morning break, clocking was once more or less the equivalent of elevenses; the related clocks is found in Yorkshire. Nineteenth-century evidence shows that this snack break was often specifically associated with artisans in urban workshops and not just with rural labourers. The spread of the evidence through five of the core counties of the Industrial Revolution fits with this, and suggests that the word’s popularity was the result of the new culture of working to the clock.
See CLOCKING UP YOUR CROUSTS, and also BAIT, JACKBIT, NUMMIT, SNAP, TOMMY
the Devil (Scotland and northern England)
A cloot, in Scotland, is a division in the hoof of an ox or sheep, hence the name Clootie for the Devil, who is popularly represented with a cloven foot. Dialect is full of local epithets for the Devil, including Auld Hornie and Dicky Devlin (Yorkshire) and Old Nick in the South-East and elsewhere; Nick may be a shortened form of ‘iniquity’, another term for ‘vice’ in early modern English morality plays.
See also BEAT THE DEVIL ROUND THE GOOSEBERRY BUSH
clothes (northern England and Scotland)
The word clout was used in Anglo-Saxon English to refer to cloth and, in the plural, to swaddling clothes. From the thirteenth century on the plural form was commonly and contemptuously used to refer to clothes in general: such use has close analogies with rags and weeds, both of which were used in the same way from a slightly later date.
The proverb ‘ne’er cast a clout till May be out’ first appeared in the sixteenth century, while the proverbial simile ‘as white (or pale) as a clout’ can be found in the works of William Caxton, Shakespeare and Bunyan – in fact it can still be found in northern England.
As befits such an essential source of food, there is in most languages a range of words for bread, which attest to regional diversity, variety and speciality, and which give credence to the idea that while the best wine may come from France, and the best tomatoes from Italy, the best bread always comes from home. In France, what qualifies as a baguette in Paris is different from the one you’ll get in Lyon. Many British regions have distinctive styles that are part of the local identity, such as soda bread and the potato-based boxty in Ireland, and the fruity bara brith in Wales. Sadly for bread-lovers, we have spent most of the past century or so losing some prized local varieties, so that the East Anglian dannock (cooked in a frying pan) or the Scottish mashloch (a coarse multigrain bread) are now rarely or never seen. Fortunately for word-lovers, however, one type of basic bread has been and remains a focus of all sorts of local names – the humble bread roll.
Roll in this sense was first used in the latter part of the sixteenth century, but quickly established itself as the standard term. As the English of south-eastern England became the basis for standard educated English over the course of the eighteenth century, so a large number of dialect alternatives arose, particularly in the North and the Midlands. These ranged from the very general, like bap and cob, which typically have now spread, at least to some extent, southwards, to the more distinctively local, such as the stotty of the North-East or the tommy of the South-West. At the extreme, batch seems largely restricted to the area around Coventry. What is sure is that anyone from the North or Midlands, visiting the South and using the word they grew up with to ask in a shop for a cheese roll, runs the risk of receiving not their lunch, but a quizzical, slightly suspicious look.
See also BAP, BARM CAKE, BUTTY, COB, MANSHON, NUBBIES, STOTTY
bread roll (northern England)
For a three-letter monosyllable, cob is a remarkably industrious little word. The basic images are those of size and stoutness (a stack of corn, a small island, a hard mass), of something that is rounded or humped (a nut, a kernel, a baked apple-dumpling) and something that, like the head, stands on top (a leader, a tuft of hair on the forehead). It is, however, probably as bread that it is best known, a sense that falls into the ‘rounded or humped’ category, giving the cob or cob-loaf, which is essentially a small loaf of bread or a small cake made of the very last piece of dough from a baking. It can also be a kind of muffin.
There are cobs in Shakespeare, or to be more precise, there is a reference in Troilus and Cressida to a coblofe (i.e. cob-loaf). This just means ‘round loaf’ or ‘lump-shaped loaf’, and is one of a number of uses of the word to refer to a roundish mass or object, such as a nut or a small haystack, but by the nineteenth century, the cob had, in terms of bread, come to mean specifically ‘a small round bread roll’. It was used chiefly in the north of England, and although it has, like bap, spread more widely in recent years, it is still more common in the North and Midlands. Another meaning of cob, common in northern England in the nineteenth century, was ‘testicle’; luckily though, there are no accounts of unfortunate misunderstandings.
See OUR DAILY BREAD, and also BAP, BARMCAKE, BUTTY, MANSHON, NUBBIES, STOTTY
a bad mood, a sulk (chiefly Liverpool and Midlands)
You can have a cob on, or get a cob on. The phrase originated in the Merchant Navy and then passed into the language of Britain’s greatest merchant port, Liverpool, from where it eventually spread across the North Midlands. It has been suggested that it is linked to the widespread dialect sense of cob, ‘a blow to the head’, but this is only speculation. It’s also common to get a bag on or a nark on in the same region.
See THE MARDY BLUES, and also MARDY, TATCHY
a children’s game similar to conkers (the South-West but also in pockets across the UK)
Cobnut, cobblety-nut or cob-joe are all names for a children’s game which, in extracting the cobnut’s kernel, putting it on a string and challenging your fellow nut-brandishers to a battle, seems to have been a parallel or perhaps earlier form of conkers. As recorded in Notes and Queries (a ‘medium of intercommunication’ for ‘readers and writers, collectors and librarians’, published in England since the mid-nineteenth century) in 1890: ‘There were many formulas and observances in the game of “cobnut” … If a couple of wax ends become twizzled, the boy who first could shout, “Twizzler, twizzler! my fost blow,” took the first stroke … When a nut was cracked so that a piece came out, the owner … called out, “Jick, jack, gell, ar shonner pley thy shell,” he took the damaged nut … On the contrary, if the owner of the damaged nut could first call out, “Jick, jack, gell, an you sholl pley my shell,” both were bound to go on till the one or other was completely smashed.’
A conker, incidentally, took its name from a term popular in East Anglia and Shropshire for a snail-shell – which in turn probably took its name from the standard word conqueror.
happy (UK-wide but originally in Merseyside)
The phrase cock-a-hoop originates from the early sixteenth century, when it was also known as ‘setting the cock on the hoop’. There are many theories as to the story behind it. A seventeenth-century glossary notes that ‘our Ancestors call’d that the Cock which we call a Spigget … the Cock being taken out, and laid on the hoop of the vessel, they used to drink up the ale as it ran out without intermission … then they were Cock-on-Hoop, i.e. at the height of mirth and jollity.’
The story is a nice one, but there is no clear evidence of the use of the word cock for spigot, and the matter is further complicated by the use of figures in tavern-signs from a much earlier date, some of which still exist. Nonetheless, there was certainly a historical connection between being cock-a-hoop and supremely drunk. Today, though, the term means simply to be ‘elated and exultant’, or ‘loudly triumphant’, whether or not alcohol has been involved.
a short measure of beer (Bath)
If you are given a combe-downer, you will feel short-changed, for it is a beer glass which isn’t quite as full as it should be. The history of the term is a lovely and very local one: it is said that the stonemasons working down at the limestone mines at Combe Down near Bath in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would ask their young apprentices to go and fetch them some beer from the local inn. The boys, in a hurry over the rough terrain of the quarries, would inevitably spill some of the ale they were so diligently carrying. The result? The chastising words ‘That’s a bit of a Combe-Downer’, a lament (albeit a more affectionate one) you can still hear in pockets of Somerset to this day when a poured refreshment isn’t quite what it ought to be.
to squat (the South-West and particularly Bristol)
To coopy down is to crouch down or to squat, and offers the image of fitting one’s body into a coop, or narrow, confined space. A coopy house is a very small house or other kind of building, and reflects standard English’s cubby-hole, which has been linked to a variety of Teutonic words meaning a ‘lean-to for cattle’ or the Dutch kub, a form of basket for fish.
to gossip (Cornwall and the West Country)
Meaning to gossip or chat, coose goes back to Old Cornish cows, and that in turn to French causer, both of which meant ‘to gossip’. This seems to be linked to French chose, ‘a thing’ (about which one is chatting or gossiping), and beyond that to Latin’s causari, ‘to plead or dispute, to argue, or to make objections for the purpose of gaining time’. Quite a long history for such an earthy-sounding word.
See ALL THE LOCAL GOSSIP, and also CANK, CHAMRAG, CLISH-MA-CLAVER, JAFFOCK, JANGLE, NEIGHBOUR, PROSS, TALE-PYET
bad-tempered (Scotland)
Crabbit is no more than the Scottish pronunciation of crabbed, and it too means ‘grumpy’ or ‘ill-tempered’. Its immediate image is that of the crab apple – and in this case its sourness. Curiously, the name of the apple itself derives from a different meaning of crabbed, one which the OED describes as ‘the crooked or wayward gait of the crustacean, and the contradictory, perverse, and fractious disposition which this expressed’. When extended to the world of fruit, the image is that of a gnarled, unappetising apple. As for people with the tendency to be crabbit, they are, ‘sour-tempered, morose, peevish and harsh’.
fun, enjoyment (Ireland)
The Irish word craic, which has endured for centuries as the pithiest of expressions for a good time (and a whole lot more besides), enjoyed a vast surge in mass consciousness with the burgeoning of Irish theme pubs across the UK and the US, the doors of which promised, amid many other emerald green stereotypes, ‘good craic’. The term means ‘good fellowship’, with plenty of (often well-lubricated) merry chat. It is quite simply a wonderful part of the Irish lexicon, and one that is rooted in a fourteenth-century meaning of the verb crack of saying something with a sense of abruptness or éclat. It is a linguistic partner with the word crack meaning a joke, and indeed with the Scottish and northern English cracking on in the sense of chattering.
gang of friends (UK-wide but particularly major cities)
Crew goes back at least as far as the sixteenth century, when it was a synonym for the wandering bands of criminal beggars. In 1970s America, the word became a by-word in the hip-hop subculture for a group of rappers, breakdancers, graffiti artists, etc. who were working or performing together. It then later became extended to a person’s friends, associates or entourage. Like click, and so much else in modern slang, the word was reborn in black English before moving out into the mainstream.
See also BLOOD, BREDREN, BUTTY, CATERCOUSIN, CHUCK, CLICK, HOMIE, MARRA, MUCKER, SORRY
a stolen apple; a pillion ride on a bicycle (the North-East; Cornwall and Devon; Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and Teesside)
For those living in Teesside, a croggy is a stolen apple, scrumped, as generations of the young have put it, from someone else’s apple tree. And, so they say, the word comes from oggie raidin, i.e. orchard raiding. That said, if you move down to Leicestershire, a croggy can be a ride hitched on a friend’s bicycle. Further south still and you can find the dish, from the South-West, known as tiddy oggy, which brings us back to the apple (along with pork, Dijon mustard and a few other things). And there is yet one more meaning too: the English Dialect Dictionary defines croggy as ‘weak in the foreleg’ (of a horse).
None of which wholly helps us as to the linguistic origin of the word. The best guess is that the northern and West-Country oggy is at the root of it (and that perhaps we steal or cadge, as it were, the ride on the crossbar). But other theories suggest a link to crog, which is Gaelic for ‘paw’, and so the hand that steals the apple. There is finally one other possibility: Cornwall’s home-grown croggan, a limpet shell, an image that makes sense if you think of the two riders, one clinging tightly to the other.
to whine; to whimper (Devon)
Croosle has a variety of meanings, including ‘whimpering like an infant just waking up’, ‘gossiping, flattering, courting favour’ or ‘talking confidentially’. Given that the English Dialect Dictionary stresses that ‘a fretful or peevish tone is always implied’ it is possible that there is some link to being cross. Its slightly different spelling, creusle, is also Devonian, and means ‘to grumble’, ‘to complain’ or, with infants still in mind, ‘to grizzle’.
a left-handed person (Scotland and northern England)
The adjective cuddy-handed has long meant left-handed in England’s North, and the curious term cuddy-wifter is quite simply a left-handed person. First, the easy one: wifter is synonymous with waft, a gesture that’s seen to brush the air away, and itself a development from whiff, a puff of air.
Cuddy, however, is less straightforward. We do know that it has been a Scottish term for a donkey since at least the early eighteenth century; it has, as the Oxford English Dictionary suggests, the same ‘homely status’ for the Scots as donkey does for the English. One theory suggests that cuddy is a diminutive form of the proper name Cuthbert, and so echoes such other donkey nicknames as Neddy and Dicky. Another suggestion, from Jamieson in his major Scottish dictionary of 1808, is that there is a Romany root. Unfortunately it would appear that no such name exists in any of the Gypsy dialects (the Scottish Gypsy term for a donkey, for instance, was eizel, which comes from German). So quite what the linguistic path to cuddy-handed and cuddy-wifter is remains unclear. One possibility is, if we understand the southpaw (as left-handers are called in boxing circles) to be considered as a figurative ass – i.e. clumsy, a cuddy-wifter would then be a donkey (-like) waver of the hands. Left-handers have never had an easy ride (but then neither have donkeys).
See also KAY-LEGGED, KEER-HANDED
a provincial, a rustic (Ireland)
Culchie is Belfast’s word of choice to deride a peasant or a country bumpkin. It was coined at University College, Galway to describe the agricultural students there. Today it is largely used in Dublin of someone from any other part of Ireland.
It has a variety of roots, all based on the town of Coillte Mach (i.e. Kiltimagh) in County Mayo. Brendan Behan in his Confessions of an Irish Rebel (1965) recalls how, ‘One night, Culchiemachs, as we call the Irish-speaking people, wished to play a game of pitch and toss.’ The word coillte itself means ‘woods’, and finally the cúl a’ tí was the back door of a great house, to which peasants would, apparently, be directed.
fine; dandy (London and UK-wide)
The golden age of the catchphrase may have waned in recent times, but TV, even in today’s all-cable, all channel-surfing wonderland, has its part to play. While Minder, the series about the London underworld that ran from 1979 to 1994, gave us ’er indoors, not long afterwards Only Fools and Horses added cushty, meaning ‘wonderful, first-rate’ or ‘magic’, to the popular lexicon. The word, which is linked to the more widely used cushy, comes from Romany kushto, kushti, ‘good’ (used unvarnished by nineteenth-century market traders), and ultimately, thanks to Romany origins in India, from Hindi khush, ‘pleasure’.