h
DRIZZLE (CUMBRIA AND Isle of Man)
Hadder is recorded in Durham and North Yorkshire, but more commonly in Cumbria and in the Isle of Man. As one Lake District resident, speaking at the beginning of the twentieth century, had it: ‘Nay, it’ll rain nin … it may hadder a bit.’ Its origin is uncertain, but hadder is a common northern form of heather, and heather is likewise recorded in the Lake District as a variant of hadder, so perhaps the suggestion is that the drizzle is like falling heather.
See DON’T TALK DRIZZLE, and also BANGE, MIZZLE, SMIRR
hot (London)
The interest in the intriguing expression harry hotters is less in the hot, which is just what it says on the label, but the long-established combination of harry and -ers. An RAF coinage from the 1940s, harry has come to mean ‘very’, but its origins are less simple. The prevailing view is that the origin lies in the old commercial travellers’ phrase Harry Freemans, slang for ‘free’ or ‘without charge’, which in turn comes from (drink at) Freeman’s Quay, an actual quay near the nineteenth-century London Bridge, where free drinks were handed out to porters and carmen. Why ‘free’ should become ‘very’, though, is unclear.
The -ers, meanwhile, is 1920s Oxford slang, where -er was thrown onto anything that would take it (and much that wouldn’t), resulting in the pragger-wagger, ‘the Prince of Wales’, and the wagger-pagger-bagger, a ‘waste-paper basket’. Perhaps the last nationwide survivor is rugger, for ‘rugby’.
to eat sloppily (Staffordshire)
Based on the German hauch, meaning ‘breath’ or ‘aspiration’, to hawch means ‘to eat badly’, usually with much slopping of the lips. To hoach and haw is dialect’s version of to hawk and spit; a hawchmouth is a foul-mouthed blusterer (who one hopes is not eating at the same time), and hawchmouthed takes in both senses: being both ‘obscene’ and, in the context of eating, ‘noisy’. The phrase for someone who stands around and does nothing but eat and gossip is one who is bide and hauchy like a girt [i.e. great] fat pig, a truly punchy expression in which bide means unmoving (as in biding your time).
hedgehog (the South-West, now rare)
An alternative to hedgehog, hedgeboars were, in name, once very common in the South-West. Another local version, hedgyboar, was also common, and was around in the 1950s when it was collected in the Survey of English Dialects.
to pour tea (Dorset)
Hell is a Scandinavian word with the general sense of ‘pour’. There are records of it in northern English dating back to the fourteenth century, and by the eighteenth it had spread down to the South-West, where it was typically used with reference to the pouring out of drinks, like tea – or cider. The form hale is also found.
See KETTLE’S ON, and also BIRLE, EMPT, MASH, MASK, SCALD, SOAK, TEEM, WET
a pasty (Cornwall and the South-West)
Hoggan, properly, means ‘pastry’ (and as such is probably linked to the Welsh chwiogen, ‘a muffin or simnel-cake’). Abbreviated to oggy, it becomes a form of pasty, a flat cake based on potatoes and originally holding a lump of salt pork in its middle. Such portable snacks are widely popular – they could be taken easily to the field, requiring no fancy ingredients, and can be found across the country. Lincolnshire, for instance, has (or certainly had) its clanger, again a pastry wrapping meat (and vegetables) at one end and in this case some form of jam ‘for afters’ at the other.
The hoggan/oggy can also come as a figgy hoggan, in which the salt pork is either replaced by the figs (giving a sort of non-industrialised fig roll), or the figs: like the jam, are stuck at the opposite end. Nor need it always be figs; apples or raisins work just as well. Still in Cornwall, the hoggan-bag was a miner’s bag in which he carried provisions, although rather than pasties, these were cuts of mutton or beef boiled or baked in a pie crust.
friend or mate (UK-wide but particularly London and major cities)
Homie has meant ‘a person from one’s hometown or neighbourhood’ (a homeboy or homegirl), or ‘a member of one’s peer group or gang’, since the 1940s. Earlier still, and in Australia, it was used for a British immigrant newly arrived and still nostalgic for home. However, it is largely thanks to black US hip-hop slang, and in particular to rap, that it is being taken up with such enthusiasm today.
The first quotation for homie in the Oxford English Dictionary is from The Original Handbook of Harlem Jive (1944), which gives the meaning of ‘one newly arrived from the South, a person from one’s home-town, one who isn’t fully aware of what is going on’. This sense of inexperience has been lost over time, and a homie is now simply a close friend or buddy. If you are hanging with your homies, you are spending time, or ‘marinating’ (‘chilling’) with them.
See also BLOOD, BREDREN, BUTTY, CATERCOUSIN, CHUCK, CLICK, CREW, MARRA, MUCKER, SORRY
a trick or deceit (Devon and the South-West)
This wonderful expression, which also appears as hook’em snivey and hookem-snivvy, was used on the streets of Victorian London of someone who feigned mortal sickness, disease or infirmity in order to find compassion (and coins) from passers-by. Francis Grose, in his 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, defines another form of hookum snivey: ‘This rig consists in feeding a man and a dog for nothing, and is carried on thus: Three men, one of who pretends to be sick and unable to eat, go to a public house: the two well men make a bargain with the landlord for their dinner, and when he is out of sight, feed their pretended sick companion and dog gratis.’
The origin of the pithy expression probably lies in the verb hook, as in ‘to lure by trickery’, and snivey, a word that may once have meant ‘deceit’ and that may be related to the idea of snivelling. According to a slang dictionary of 1874, the term could also be used as ‘an irrelevant answer, as in “Who did that?” “Hook um snivey” – actually no one.’
a fair (Scotland and northern England)
Hoppen, from the North-East, means ‘a funfair’, and appears to combine a pair of monosyllables: hop and ken. The first, hop, has meant a dance since the mid-eighteenth century and is based on a variety of northern European roots meaning ‘to jump about’. The second, ken, was what the Oxford English Dictionary terms ‘vagabond’s slang for a room or place’, and most likely comes from the standard English term kennel (in a non-canine mode) or from Hindi khan(n)a, both of which mean ‘a house or room’ and which can also be found in combinations such as buggy-khanna (coach house), bottle-khanna (drinking house), or indeed gymkhana, which was once the ball-house or racquet court, a place for athletic sporting events.
One other option is out there: the nineteenth-century slang chronicler J. C. Hotten thought it to be of Romany origin, noting that ‘all slang and cant words which end in -ken are partly of Gypsey origin’.
We may never know the truth.
hungry (Cumbria, Durham and Northumberland)
Hungered functions in the far north of England as a simple version of hungry. Etymologically, it is a survival of the Middle English adjective a-hungered with the loss of the weak first syllable, probably under the influence of the past participle of the verb to hunger. In 1803, an important early student of northern dialects, Samuel Pegge, wrote that ‘in the north they say of one who keeps his servants on short commons that he hungers them.’
See LEERY FOR LUNCH, and also CLAMMED, CLEMT, LEER/LEERY, YAP
In a reversal of the usual, synonyms for hungry seem more likely to take hold in the South than in the North. The only alternative widely recorded north of the Midlands is hungered, which is very close to the standard term anyway. You can be wallow in Cumbria and gant in Yorkshire, but neither is as common or as widespread as equivalents found in the Midlands and the South, including famelled (the south-west Midlands and Oxfordshire), empty, famishing (Yorkshire and the Midlands), hearty (Worcestershire and Surrey), jimp (Aberdeen), pined (East Midlands) and sinking (Sussex).
See also CLAMMED, CLEMT, HUNGERED, LEER/LEERY
April Fool (Scotland)
In the early eighteenth century, the phrase to hunt the gowk was used to mean ‘to go on a fool’s errand’, but by the end of the century it had come primarily to mean ‘play an April Fool on someone’. Subsequently, hunt-the-gowk became another term for an April Fool, and over the course of the nineteenth century, it was shortened to huntigowk, either for April Fool’s Day itself, or for the tricks played on it. One 12-year-old girl from Edinburgh told researchers in the 1950s: ‘Huntigowk is a day I love. I like to put a basin of water at the side of my sister’s bed and hear her let out a yell when she puts her feet into it.’
See A PINCH AND A PUNCH, and also APRIL GAWBY, APRIL GOWK, APRIL NODDY, FOOL GOWK, MAY GOSLING