f
BOTHER, FUSS (SCOTLAND, northern England and the Lake District)
‘Dun’t fash thisel,’ they say in the Lake District, and a good few places besides (in Scotland it’s ‘dinna …’) and what it means is ‘don’t worry, don’t bother yourself’. The word is a direct borrowing from France, where fâcher means ‘to annoy or to irritate’, although the altruistic meaning that underpins our fash, ‘to bother oneself’ (for someone else’s sake), doesn’t appear to be there. Fash gives fasherie (which also offers a very French feel), meaning ‘annoyance’, and fashious, ‘troublesome’. Scotland’s phrase never fash yer heid or thumb means ‘pay no heed’ to such-and-such.
a freckle (Scotland and Northern Ireland)
Fernticle, a word thought to be obsolete but recorded by the BBC during its interviews for the Voices Project, is part of older Northern Irish dialect and is also found in Scots as fairnitickle. The word originated in the Middle English word farntikylle, describing a mark on the skin resembling the seed of the fern.
condition; state; to clean (Scotland and northern England)
Cleanliness, it seems, remains out there ahead of godliness, at least when it comes to that popular indicator of good condition, being in fine fettle. Indeed, it may all probably go back to standard English fit, which has possible links with fettle’s own more immediate origin, the Anglo-Saxon word fettle, meaning ‘to gird up’. So you can be fettled or girded up (literally speaking, with a gird or belt around one’s waist) and so in good condition. Today’s verb to fettle means ‘to clean’, ‘to tidy’, ‘to put to rights’, while as a noun it denotes a condition, state, order or repair. A fettler is a cleaner, and fettling day cleaning day.
good; suitable; correct (Cornwall)
If you are fitty in Cornish, you will also be viddy in Devonian, and in both places you would be doing the right thing, for both terms mean ‘appropriate’, ‘correct’, and hence ‘trim and neat’. Both too are probably derived from the now obsolete adjective featish, which was used to describe people who were well proportioned or handsome. In the olden days, to behave fitty-ways was the ultimate in good etiquette.
pretty (the South-West and South Wales)
Fitty is recorded in southern speech going right back to the sixteenth century, meaning ‘right, proper’: the same as the standard English words fit or fitting. By the eighteenth century, it had become strongly focused in the South-West, especially Devon and Cornwall, and a series of extended senses are recorded there too, including ‘neat and tidy’, ‘clever’, ‘healthy’ (the modern sense of fit) and ‘attractive, pretty’. The Dorset dialect poems of William Barnes mention ‘the vittiest maid in all the feair’ (the use of ‘v’ for ‘f’ in stressed syllables is characteristic of broad South-West dialect; feair means ‘fair’). Fitty-looking is also common in this sense, especially in ‘a fitty-looking maid’.
Fitty continues to be used in the core sense of ‘proper’ (in the Poldark novels of Winston Graham, for example), and so does fitty-looking.
See SITTING PRETTY, below, and also BONNY
When it comes to the lexicon of local adjectives for attractive, the cupboard is particularly bare. Half of them rely on a simple pattern whereby a general adjective of approval is combined with -looking. And most of the exceptions are just an adjective of this kind simply used in a specific context, like braw, canny or grand. Decent, in Yorkshire, is barely even an adjective of approbation. Compare that with the national adjectives fit, gorgeous, hot, lush, tasty, stonkin, purdy and, of course, sexy.
But there are some older words which still hold their own, including bonny, which resembles sexy in that it can nowadays be applied to pretty much anything approved of, and fitty-looking, which offers an interesting comparison with the modern fit. You may also encounter bon (Cumbria), bonny-looking (Yorkshire), bostin (West Midlands), braw (Scotland), canny (Cumbria), decent (Yorkshire), fine (North), flash, (Yorkshire), flasher (as a noun, Berkshire), good-like, grand, grand-looking (Yorkshire), handsome, handsome-looking (East Anglia), smart (more common in the South), smartish (Somerset) and smart-looking (Kent, Westmorland, Yorkshire).
A nice enough list, but it is strangely small compared to our labels for ugliness. Go figure.
five-pound note (Liverpool)
Flim is short for flimsy, which refers to paper, specifically that on which currency notes are printed – in this caser a fiver. While the term is currently associated with Liverpool, it dates to the mid-nineteenth century when it apparently had no local ties. Flimsy, some forty years older, was the monetary opposite of another term, blunt, which referred to coins.
drunk (Ireland)
Recorded in Ireland from the early twentieth century, fluthered can also be found (if sparsely) recorded in the North. Like stocious, it is now most often used adverbially as in fluthered drunk.
See LIQUID LUNCHES, and also BLOOTERED, DRUCKEN, DRUFFEN, MALLETED, PISHED, PUGGLED, SKIMMISHED, STOCIOUS
silly (Yorkshire)
Fond has been a northern word for hundreds of years, as the past participle of fon, an old verb meaning ‘to act foolishly’ and commonly found in medieval mystery plays from York, Wakefield and Coventry as well as in Shakespeare. It was recorded in Scotland and throughout the North and Midlands in the nineteenth century, but by the time of the Survey of English Dialects, which collected local vocabulary in the 1950s, it had settled mainly in north-east Yorkshire.
See DON’T BE DAFT, and also ADDLE-HEADED, BARMY, DAFT, GORMLESS, QUILT, SOFT
April Fool (Scotland and Northumberland)
Gowk is an equivalent to fool (see April gowk), so fool gowk is literally ‘fool fool’. It is possible that it was originally part of a reinforcing expression, ‘April Fool gowk’, and that the April was subsequently dropped. Whatever its origin, though, it retains a strong local flavour for one of the oldest traditions in British culture.
See A PINCH AND A PUNCH, and also APRIL GAWBY, APRIL GOWK, APRIL NODDY, HUNTIGOWK, MAY GOSLING
earwig (Yorkshire)
In Latin the earwig is Forficula auricularis, which seems to translate as the ‘small shears’ (forfix being the shears part, plus the female diminutive -ula) or ‘scissors’ of the earlobe. The image presumably works better for natural historians. It is, however, that Forficula which gives our link to Yorkshire’s forkin robbins, which also means the common earwig. Where the robbins bit comes from is a mystery: do earwigs have any relationship with the red-breasted bird? According to the English Dialect Dictionary it is a very specific term, used in the East Riding of Yorkshire; in the North Riding, or at least in the south of the North Riding, they prefer the term twitchbell, which may be a euphemism of another dialectal earwig: the twitch-ballock. The twitch clock or twitch clog, meanwhile, is a cockroach.
to fuss (Cornwall)
To freck is, much as it sounds, to fuss. It comes from the word fraik, which is defined variously as to flatter, wheedle, cajole, coax and to make much ado about a person in order to gain some object. Thus there is the noun fraiking, meaning ‘flattering or coaxing’, and the adjective freck, describing something or someone wheedling. All that noted, there is yet a further link to consider: the word freak in the sense of ‘a whim or fancy’. (And freak, which gained such enormous popularity in the days of freak-outs, freaks, and freaky psychedelia, seems, very fittingly, to have its own roots in Anglo-Saxon fracian, ‘to dance’.)
‘me first’ in children’s games (Scotland and the North-East)
Fuggy, used in many a children’s game to declare ‘I’m first’, is one of those terms, like the games themselves, that are far older than our modern world. And while the spelling may have changed, there seems little doubt that it is the modern version of the nineteenth century’s fugie, fugie-blow and fidgie, all from the standard English fugitive, which once had another meaning of ‘a blow given as a challenge to fight’.
On 30 June 1898, the Glasgow Herald ran a long article about fidgies, the ancestors of today’s fuggy, which explains them expertly: ‘In common use just before the days of School Boards. In those days, as now, it was not always necessary to follow up a challenge with a blow, but the boy who would not fight another of his own size after receiving a “fidjie” was unanimously voted a coward and generally sent to Coventry. When a “fidjie” was not sufficient provocation to produce a fight a second blow was often given, and this couplet repeated: “That’s your fidgie, that’s your blow; Ye’re be’t an’ I’m no.”’
The Herald journalist added another word to the mix: ‘The more confident of the two combatants usually administered the “foodjie” (a very slight push with the open hand). If his opponent failed to respond to it, then he repeated the following rhyme: “There’s the foodjie, there’s the blow; Fight me, or else no.” The blow was simply another slight push on the breast, but with the closed fist.’
It’s not for nothing that the children’s playground is seen as one of the most productive generators of new words.
a person of foul habits (Yorkshire)
In addition to the above, the Oxford English Dictionary gives the alternative definition of a fustilugs as a ‘fat, frowzy woman’. Whatever their gender, a fustilugs is always someone who is slow and heavy (the lug part), with habits that are at best unpleasant and at worst positively foul (fusty conjures up smells of damp, mould, staleness and a definite lack of freshness). A work from the 1620s includes the wonderful line ‘Every lover admires his mistress, though she be … a vast virago, or … a fat fustylugs.’ Today’s Yorkshireman may not share quite the same view.
ugly (London)
Most of us know fusty as something that gives off a stale smell (from fust, ‘a mouldy wine-barrel’). Used of people, however, fusty has also meant ‘ill-tempered’ (at least in Samuel Pepys’s diaries), ‘seedy’ and ‘smelly’, for centuries. Ugliness, its latest meaning, is just one step on in its history.
See THE MIRROR CRACKED, and also BUTTERS, DUFFY, LAIDLY, MINGING, MUNTER, OBZOCKY, RANK, SKANK