d
AN EXPERT, A practised doer of something (originally the East End of London, now UK-wide)
In this well-known phrase, the hand means a person, using the process known as metonymy – whereby the specific object is used to denote the greater whole – to do so. Meanwhile dab is an old word, beginning life in late seventeenth-century criminal slang, where it means one who is ‘expert, exquisite in Roguery’ (as the Oxford English Dictionary has it). From there it passed on to gambling jargon, where it described a top-flight gamester, and around 1900 seemed especially popular among schoolboys who could be dabs at cricket or classics. Those who read translations of the work of social chronicler Honoré de Balzac will be familar with the use of dab to describe his master-criminal Vautrin (himself based on a real-life master-thief-turned-thief-taker Vidocq, who later became Paris’s chief of police). Its origins remain obscure, although it has been tied to Latin dabo, ‘I give’ – presumably, in this case, referring to expertise.
silly (chiefly the North)
Daft has been used since Anglo-Saxon times. Originally it meant ‘mild, gentle’, but it went on to develop the sense ‘silly’ by the fourteenth century at the latest. It has always been a predominantly northern and Scottish word. Although now known throughout England (if a little less common in the South-East), it remains characteristically northern, so that the song ‘Everyone Thinks He Looks Daft’, by the Leeds band The Wedding Present, can be seen as implicitly asserting a real northern identity.
See DON’T BE DAFT, and also ADDLE-HEADED, BARMY, FOND, GORMLESS, QUILT, SOFT
old-fashioned (UK-wide but particularly the North-East)
A dag is a clotted lump of wool and dung that hangs from the fleece surrounding a sheep’s rear end. They cannot of course be alone in such accessories, but the sheep tend to be Australians or New Zealanders – at least that’s where the word originates. So too does the adjective daggy, meaning ‘tedious’, ‘conservative’ and ‘socially unacceptable’ not to mention ‘scruffy’ and ‘unclean’. In this case it appears to have quit the Antipodes to tour its European home. Or at least Britain’s school playgrounds where it remains a popular term of abuse.
soft shoes (Wales and Wiltshire)
Daps originally referred to slippers, but today are what have been termed plimsolls, gym shoes and currently trainers, even if the simple dap is unlikely to offer the kind of bells and whistles the modern wearer forks out so much to display. The term is possibly linked to their slapping along the ground: there is a verb ‘to dap’, again that little bit onomatopœic, which refers to the bounce of a ball – and so the image might well be of bouncing along in your rubber-soled shoes. One other theory is that the term developed from an earlier verb meaning ‘to hop and skip’. It seems to have been local to the South-West and South Wales ever since its first appearance in the 1920s, and it remains the standard word in that area. Dylan Thomas refers to a pair of lost daps in his story ‘The Map of Love.’
See ANYONE FOR SANNIES? and also GUTTIES, PUMPS, SANNIES
daydreamer (East Anglia)
Dardledumdue is a beautiful old East Anglian word for a daydreamer. Unfortunately the story ends there, for there seems to be no clue available as to where it comes from. The term conjures up an image of some happy peasant, straw drooping from his lips, a donkey’s battered straw hat borrowed to keep off the bees, ambling along some country lane singing some tuneless ‘dumdeedumdee’ tune. But any interpretation has to be subjective, and perhaps it is part of the beauty of the word that dardledumdue can mean whatever we want it to.
to saunter; to idle (Scotland and northern England)
Daunder is a variation on the more widely used dander. Not the dander you can get up, but the one that means ‘to saunter, stroll or wander’, as well as ‘to waste time’ and even ‘to hobble’. Hence comes danderer, a wanderer or time-waster, and the dandering-Kate, a plant more formally known as the stone orpine or stonecrop (and which is also known as the livelong). Daunder joins other onomatopœic words denoting similar activities, or lack of them, including mooching, pootling and footling.
Words for splay-footed bear many resemblances, unsurprisingly, to those for pigeon-toed. Splay-footed is, like pigeon-toed, an uncomplicated descriptive term, but it is considerably older (mid-sixteenth century) and has an established history of use in standard, literary sources from the beginning. If it stayed constant for centuries, however, its counterparts in dialect make up a dazzlingly long list – one, in fact, of the longest of any subject. Here are just some of them:
bat-footed (Essex, Suffolk), bedlam-feet, broad-arrowed (Somerset), broad-footed, broad-toed, cow-heeled, dew-footed (Norfolk), duck-footed (North), ducky-feet, four o’clock (Berkshire), goose-footed (Durham), lady forward (North Wales), open-toed, pin-toed, plaw-footed, pratt-footed (Kent), pumple-footed (Somerset), quarter-past-nine (Somerset), quarter-to-five (Wiltshire), quarter-to-four (Norfolk), quarter-to-nine (Lancashire, Cornwall), quarter-to-three or quarter-to-two (the South-West), rab-footed, scrabble-footed (Somerset), scrog-footed, scrush-footed, shovel-footed (Nottinghamshire, Lancashire), scrog-footed (Suffolk), skew-footed, slab-footed, sly-footed (Isle of Man), splar-foot, splar-footed, and splatter-foot, splatter-footed, splawdered, splawder-foot, splawder-footed, splawdy-footed (Yorkshire, Lincolnshire), sprawled (West Glamorgan), sprawl-footed (East Wales), sprog-hocked (Staffordshire), ten-to-two, Wednesday-and-Thursday (Norfolk), wem-footed (Norfolk), wide-feet (Berkshire), wide-foot (Kent) and wide-footed (Devon, Norfolk).
Some of these are undeniably evocative. In Norfolk, Wednesday-and-Thursday suggests your feet don’t even know what day of the week it is. The Kentish pratt-footed seems to mean ‘buttock-footed’, although it is unclear whether this is just descriptive or involves implicit criticism or contempt. The latter can be seen in the Manx sly-footed and perhaps in lady forward from North Wales. Even the purely descriptive variants are frequently more vividly creative than their pigeon-toed equivalents, like broad-arrowed or sprog-hocked (which derives from a dialect word meaning ‘a fork in a tree branch’). Possibly the most common type of formation now involves envisaging the person’s feet as the hands of a clock telling the time as ten-to-two, quarter-to-three, or (in Wiltshire, where some people must have double-jointed ankles) quarter-to-five.
See also DEW-FOOTED, PASTY-FOOTED
a stolen marble (Cheshire)
In his lively compendium of extraordinary words The Meaning of Whiffling, Adam Jacot de Boinod lists just a few of the many names for marbles in the north-east of England. They include alleys, boodies, glassies, liggies, marvels, muggles, penkers, parpers, and scudders. In addition to these nicknames, there is a local lexicon for marble-playing that survives to this day. To deegle is, in Cheshire, to pilfer or steal, while in the same county a cheeny or a crodle is a large marble, and a Spotted Dick a flecked one. A neggy-lag, in Yorkshire, is the penultimate shot in a game of marbles, while flirt takes on a whole new meaning in Yorkshire where it means ‘to flick a marble with your finger and thumb’.
splay-footed (Norfolk)
The dew in dew-footed is used here in its completely standard meaning. So how on earth can feet pointing slightly apart be like the dew? The answer appears if you discover that Norfolk dialect also contains two nouns denoting someone who is splay-footed: dew-dasher and dew-sweeper. And so the image is in fact rather poetic, for dew-footed could be defined as ‘sweeping up the dew with one’s feet’.
See NO MEAN FEET, above, and also PASTY-FOOTED
sleepy; dusky (Devon)
The use of the word dimpsy to mean ‘sleepy’ suggests an intriguing link between two ideas with which it is connected: twilight and haziness.
In Devon, you might hear that ‘it’s getting a bit dimpsy’; in other words, dusk is falling. The adjective dimpsy comes from the word dimps, meaning twilight, and which may be derived from dim, in this case referring to fading light.
Dimps may, however, also be a variant of the word dumps, which has had various meanings over time, among them ‘a dazed or puzzled state of mind’, or ‘a fit of melancholy’ (in the dumps). Dumps itself probably comes from a Low German/Dutch word meaning ‘haze’ or ‘mist’ – again suggestive perhaps of a sleepy state.
tired out, exhausted (north-east Scotland)
Recorded principally in Aberdeen since the beginning of the twentieth century, dirt is an adverbial use of a noun employed as a contemptuous or offensive epithet (as in ‘He’s a dirt’). Deen is the past participle of dae, the Scottish form of do, so the whole means ‘done to dirt’ (or something ruder).
See ALL PAGGERED AND POOTLED, and also BLETHERED, BUSHWHA, JIGGERED, LAMPERED, MAGGLED, WABBIT
a household spirit said to haunt certain premises or localities (Sussex and the Lake District)
The word dobbie is probably an altered form of Robbie, the pet-name for Robin. This has been the source of many a name for imps and spirits, including hobgoblin (of which hob is another form), and Robin Goodfellow – a mischievous elf who was said to haunt the English countryside in the sixteenth and seveteenth centuries. In Sussex, the sprite also goes by the name of Master Dobbs.
a bottle of beer (Newcastle)
Dog is a term that embraces a wide variety of meanings, especially in slang. As far as specifically local usages are concerned, the most recent is probably the one in Newcastle for a bottle of beer, the local Newky Brown. This sense of the term emerged during the 1980s when a new advertising campaign, entitled ‘The Dog’, exploited the local euphemism of ‘I’m going to walk the dog’, meaning ‘I’m off to the pub for a bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale’. The ad featured a finger in the process of opening a can, giving the sound Wooof! as the air rushed out.
to play truant (Cheshire)
In the course of the local interviews undertaken for the BBC’s Voices Project, the word dog emerged as a synonym in Cheshire for playing truant. Despite the lack of evidence for this sense of the word in both the English Dialect Dictionary and the OED, there is a large body of evidence in American printed records, from the 1920s onwards, for the phrase to dog it, meaning ‘to shirk’, ‘to waste time’, ‘to malinger’, or ‘to act lazily’. This may well be one of thousands of terms that were part of the great movement of American slang across the Atlantic after the Second World War.
See BUNKING AND PLUNKING, and also BUNK OFF, MITCH, NICK OFF, PLAY HOOKEY PLUNK, SAG, SKIDGE, SKIVE, TWAG, WAG
How to talk like … a Geordie
‘Geordie’ is how people often refer loosely to anyone from the north-east of England. Yet the term is strictly speaking applied only to denizens of the city of Newcastle and their accent: ‘Morpethian’s Morpethian,’ says with pride an elderly inhabitant of the nearby market town of Morpeth, ‘an’ thah aul differen” – ‘they’re all different!’ So I shall here speak more fittingly perhaps about a Northumbrian accent, with a particular Tyneside city variety that ranges from the fringe of Wearside to the south and just a little up the coast into the former mining area to the north.
The Northumbrian accent lies at the diametrical opposite end of the ‘accent appreciation index’ to the speech of those other two great English urban centres, Liverpool and Birmingham. Geordie almost always comes top in favourite accent surveys and it’s said that call centres used to like to recruit staff from Northumberland because they naturally spoke in ‘warm and friendly’ tones. Now of course, an angry fight in Newcastle is no less ugly than one on Merseyside, but it’s true that it’s hard not to smile on leaving the train at Newcastle station, surrounded as the visitor is by the lilting ‘song’ of Geordie speech. Northumbrian has a rising inflection which combines with the many glottal stops (momentary slivers of silence, here breathed into something far more substantial than their Cockney cousin). So ‘proper’ becomes ‘pro’ah’ – ‘pro’ah oould women’ (‘proper old women’); but it goes much further.
There’s no rhoticity (r-sounding) in Geordie, so where in other parts of the country we’d readily insert a rogue ‘r’ to form expressions like the now familiar ‘lauranorder’ (law and order), in the North-East this just doesn’t happen. Here they insert a little hiatus, a fractional stop, which combines very naturally with the modified vowel sounds of Geordie, and the ubiquitous ‘ah’ sound. ‘Thah–‘aul differen’,’ said our lady from Morpeth, where ‘thah–’ represents my attempt to render the Northumbrian version of ‘they are’ followed by one of those little characteristic hiccups which give the accent its delicious jerkiness.
So Geordie has a distinctive tune, a very recognisable rhythm; what about the notes themselves? Well, unsurprisingly, much of the heart of what makes Geordie Geordie lies in the vowels. And in pride of place comes the sound you hear day in, day out on Tyneside, which I’ll render here as ‘iuh’, and it’s the Northumbrian version of the sound in ‘day in, day out’ which in Byker becomes the diphthong ‘diuh’. So if a gadgie (bloke) asks your ‘niuhm’ he’s asking what you’re called; and if he wants you not to hang about over it, he’ll tell you to say it striUHT-aWIUH, or straight away.
In Northumbrian, also, the ‘aye’s have it – not only is it the normal word for ‘yes’, but the sound itself, with a strongly pronounced ‘y’ in it, crops up all over the place and is one of the accent’s most obvious characteristics, so nice becomes ‘niyce’, mile, ‘miyle’, and that quintessential area of Newcastle, called Byker, is ‘BIYY-kah’. In fact there’s a tendency to insert this ‘y’ sound everywhere, so married becomes ‘marriyd’ and again is ‘aGIYuhn’.
‘Wor’ is a sound that covers both our (‘wor awn house’ is our own house) and were, so ‘We wor happy to have wor awn house’ is the proud boast of the Tyneside home-owner, or ‘hoouhm-oouhner’ as a local would say it. Up here the open ‘o’ sound of oats, home, open, and that sad phenomenon of economic downturns not just in the North-East the dole, is another marked diphthong with a strong bend in the middle, ‘oouhts’, ‘hoouhm’, ‘oouhpn’ and ‘doouhl’. Except of course in the word nobody which is, Scots-fashion, ‘naebody’, and in the tag expression you know, which is always ‘yi nah’.
Finally on these rich Newky vowels, I must mention the way the long vowels ‘er’ and ‘or’ sound. So words like work, furniture and first all now seem to have ‘aw’ in the middle – ‘wawk’, ‘fawniture’ and ‘fawst’, and conversely all becomes ‘ahl’. To the standard northern ‘oo’ for ‘u’ (lucky is ‘looky’) you can add those juicy local formations like ‘divvent’ for don’t and a host of classic dialectal terms – hinny, pet, canny and the rest – and you’ve brewed up a distinctive accent that’s made its way firmly into the popular imagination through TV hits like Auf Wiedersehen, Pet and the County Durham-set film Billy Elliot.
So in the pit raas (pit rows) of north-east England, a bairn (child) can grow up to be not a chav as elsewhere in the country, but a chava or charver, the Geordie term for a young guy with attitude. He can find life canny (nice) or even canny nice (which is presumably twice as nice), or indeed cushty (excellent). He would never go anywhere but, as in the famous song ‘Blaydon Races’, gan (‘ye should’ve seen us gannin”). He would certainly gan hyem (go home) each night to see his hinny, after working with his marras (mates), unless he’d had a bad day and was feeling radgy (angry). In which case he might head down to the pub and sink a pint of local Radgie Gadgie (man) ale (brewed at the Mordue Brewery, Wallsend), though these days he’d have to stand outside to light up a tab (cigarette)!
SIMON ELMES
mad, crazy (London and now UK-wide)
Doolally, or in full doolally tap, is one of the linguistic survivors of the old British Raj, and of the Army that backed it up. The term came from the Deolali military sanatorium in Bombay, to which mentally ill troops were sent at the close of the nineteenth century. However, according to the veteran Frank Richards, writing in his memoir Old Soldier Sahib (1936), the illness came not before one arrived at Deolali but during one’s stay there. Time-expired troops were sent to the sanatorium to await the next troop-ship home. It was during the long hot days of tedium that men, formerly first-class soldiers, might gradually go to pieces. Going doolally was their pronunciation of their fate at Deolali.
backside (Scotland)
‘I’ll kick your doup!’ is an expression many a Scottish child will have heard, and feared. Doup is pronounced ‘dowp’ and can mean the bottom end of anything, especially if it is round in shape. Its origin is unknown but it may derive from dolp, which is the bottom of an eggshell.
getting annoyed with (Liverpool)
We can thank Liverpool’s Irish community for the colourful expression down the banks, which apparently refers to nothing more sophisticated than peat bogs, down the steep banks of which unfortunate people might roll, ending up immersed in the deep, peaty water. P. W. Joyce’s English As We Speak It In Ireland (1910) offers the alternative phrase to give someone down the banks, meaning ‘to scold or reprimand’. Amazingly, exactly that same formulation can be found across the Atlantic 25 years earlier, namely in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn of 1884.
a sweetheart (UK-wide but particularly London and Cornwall)
In dialect use, the adjective doxy means ‘dainty’, ‘petite’, ‘smart’ or ‘pretty’; as a noun it means ‘a sweetheart’ or ‘a young girl’. But the same word can also be a negative, describing a slattern or overdressed old woman (often referring to a man’s wife). In either context its definition is a mystery. It may be based on Dutch docke, meaning ‘a doll’, which of course means ‘girl’ in English slang as well, or, with the accent still on slang, there may be a punning link to dock meaning ‘tail’, and thus a ‘piece of tail’. This would certainly work for doxy’s earliest known use, in the criminal slang of the sixteenth century, where it describes the mistress of a rogue or beggar and, often synonymously, a promiscuous woman or even a prostitute. Here she might be an arch-doxy, in which case her ‘boyfriend’ was the gang’s boss, or a doxy-dell, which is literally a doubling, ‘promiscuous woman-promiscuous woman’, and which, unsurprisingly, means ‘a whore’.
directly; in a while (Devon and Cornwall)
Dreckly is almost always part of the stereotypical Devonian phrase-book. And yet, unlike so many dialect impersonations, it is genuinely still used. Although a local pronunciation of directly, it is not quite that simple, for dreckly more often than not means ‘when I get around to it’, or even ‘I’ll do it later’. A little like the Spanish mañana, in fact.
thirsty (Scotland)
Drought, the state of rainlessness, tends to be applied to countries and their landscapes, but the Scottish drouthie, which draws on the same word, means ‘thirsty’, and definitely applies to humans. Not only that, but it can also mean ‘addicted to drink’ (and not water either). Glasgow spells things a little differently – droothy – but the meanings are the same.
Anything can mean ‘drunk’ – especially if it is in the form ‘I got -ed last night’. A nowhere-near-exhaustive list of current slang terms could include muntered, mullered, pissed, blitzed, wrecked, trashed, plastered, sloshed, shit-faced, wasted, bombed, canned, loaded, buzzed, bevvied, hammered, wasted, tipsy, bladdered, rat-arsed, steaming, smashed, wankered, slaughtered, trolleyed, blottered, three sheets to the wind, merry, half-cut, tiddly, blathered, blotto, lashed or pie-eyed. And that’s just for starters.
Interestingly, most of these expressions are fairly recent, and they seem to have replaced a similar wealth of dialect terms from the nineteenth century. For example, someone could be beerified, foxed, kaylied or faxt in West Yorkshire, rory in Scotland or corned in the Midlands, or corny in the East (both apparently deriving from an old word describing beer with a strong malt taste). One could be hoddy-doddy in Devon (which means that a drunken Devonian visiting Lancashire and finding himself the butt of an April Fool would have been a hoddy-doddy niddy-noddy!). The principal dialect forms today are centred in Scotland and Ireland, which probably says less about the drinking per se in those countries than it does about the role of drink in their literary cultures and the brilliance of the writers who have written about it.
See also BLOOTERED, DRUCKEN, DRUFFEN, FLUTHERED, MALLETED, PISHED, PUGGLED, SKIMMISHED, STOCIOUS
drunk (Scotland and northern England)
A northern variant of drunken, drucken is of Scandinavian origin. It was recorded in southern Scotland and in England north of Derbyshire by the English Dialect Dictionary (1902), but by the Survey of English Dialects, taken in the 1950s, it had become restricted to Yorkshire. It goes a long way back: it is recorded of a young Lancastrian man of the nineteenth century that he ‘gets blin’ drucken amang his mates’.
See LIQUID LUNCHES, and also BLOOTERED, DRUFFEN, FLUTHERED, MALLETED, PISHED, PUGGLED, SKIMMISHED, STOCIOUS
drunk (Yorkshire)
Druffen was common in West Yorkshire in the nineteenth century and was still recorded there by the Survey of English Dialects in the 1950s, which also discovered it just over the border in Lancashire. It is probably just an alteration of drunken.
See also LIQUID LUNCHES, and also BLOOTERED, DRUCKEN, FLUTHERED, MALLETED, PISHED, PUGGLED, SKIMMISHED, STOCIOUS
ugly (Liverpool)
Duffy is a Caribbean word transplanted to Liverpool, which has one of the oldest West Indian communities in the country – hardly surprising when you think of Liverpool’s history as Britain’s major transatlantic port. Duffy seems to derive from the Caribbean word duppy. In Jamaican folklore, the duppy was a ghost or spirit of a dead person capable of returning to the earth to help or (usually) harm a living person. The same tradition is recorded in other parts of the Caribbean and in the American South. It is clearly of African origin, and the word derives from dupe, ‘ghost’, in the Bube language (one of the Bantu languages of West Africa). Duffy is used to describe a sexually unattractive person; the implication appears to be that to be approached by that person is as frightening as being set upon by a duppy.
See THE MIRROR CRACKED, and also BUTTERS, FUSTY, LAIDLY, MINGING, MUNTER, OBZOCKY, RANK, SKANK
dusk (the South-West)
Dummets is a pleasing word which, like Devon’s dimpsy, suggests the softness of fading light: the dusk or twilight. And like the natural fading of the day its origins are simple: the standard English dim, which itself comes from Old English dimm, meaning ‘obscure’, or ‘dark’. Simple it may be, but it is also very beautiful.
a lavatory or privy (Scotland and Australia)
The dunny is the modern abbreviation of an old word from criminal slang – dunekin (or dunegan, dunnakin, dunniken and dunyken, with further variations dunnigan and dunnee in Australia). Dunekin itself was a combination of two cant or criminal slang words: danna, meaning human or other excrement (and itself perhaps from dung), and ken, meaning a place or house. Among less savoury nineteenth-century occupations was that of driving the danna-drag (drag meaning ‘a horse-drawn vehicle’) or nightsoil cart, emptying cesspits and privies while their daytime users slept. The dunnigan or donegan worker was, however, not the man who sat on the danna-drag. Instead he was a thief, at least in 1930s America, who hung round public lavatories, hoping to steal from discarded coats or to take parcels or any other items that had been foolishly left unattended.