j
A SNACK; A packed lunch (the South-West, Berkshire and Hampshire)
Among bit’s many meanings is ‘a piece of food’, thus jackbit means ‘a bite of something to eat’, usually in the morning. (Thus too the older and beautiful dew-bit, which is still to be found in Somerset, Dorset, Berkshire and Hampshire, and which means the mid-morning breakfast taken in the fields when the dew is still on the ground.) But why jack? Probably because jack is a generic term for a fellow or bloke; more specifically it can also mean ‘a young workman’, exactly the sort of person to carry such a meal.
See CLOCKING UP YOUR CROUSTS, and also BAG, BAIT, CLOCKING, NUMMIT, SNAP, TOMMY
to gossip (Lancashire)
Jaffock is an imitative formation – you can just hear the movement of the jaw as the chatterer chatters – but perhaps not exactly imitative of gossip or chatter alone, as it is recorded in the nineteenth century in Cheshire meaning ‘to argue’. Jaffock defies the dialect dictionaries, but it’s possible to offer a guess at its origins. A blend of jaw, whether a literal jaw, or in the sense of chatter or gossip, and fake, which, before it gained its popular meaning of alter or disguise, meant among eighteenth-century thieves and vagabonds ‘to make’ (usually for the purposes of deception). So, to borrow an old-fashioned bit of American, jaffocking may be ‘making with the jaw’, just as someone who wags with the chin is a ‘chinwag’.
See ALL THE LOCAL GOSSIP, and also CANK, CANT, CHAMRAG, CLISH-MA-CLAVER, COOSE, JANGLE, NEIGHBOUR, PROSS, TALE-PYET
to gossip (Liverpool and North Wales)
Recorded in the fourteenth century with the sense of chattering or babbling, jangle is of French origin. It is probably echoic of the noise we’re making, and of course it exists in standard English as well as dialect. If, however, the standard jangles are usually metallic objects, the dialect form deals in people, whose jangle is gossip or empty chatter. It is now used chiefly in Liverpool, on Merseyside, and in North Wales both as a verb and as a noun.
There is in fact a host of terms from the same root which turn idle chatter into the angry kind: the verb to jangle can mean to quarrel angrily, and so a janglement is an angry dispute and a jangler a quarrelsome wrangler. Janglesome once meant quarrelsome, and a jangling can be an argument, generally of the sort that the police term a domestic. Finally, when used of children, the verb means ‘to cry’. In all senses the idea is of a noise, and usually an unpleasant one.
The noun use denoting gossiping is especially common in Liverpool, e.g. ‘He knew Dave missed all the jangle from Liverpool as much as he did.’ This sense was also collected in nineteenth-century Suffolk.
See ALL THE LOCAL GOSSIP, and also CANK, CANT, CHAMRAG, CLISH-MA-CLAVER, COOSE, JAFFOCK, NEIGHBOUR, PROSS, TALE-PYET
young person in trendy clothes and flashy jewellery (the South-West)
Janner is a regional nickname for inhabitants of Plymouth and their dialect, and by extension someone with a Devon accent. It is thought to be a mocking self-reference to the Devonian pronunciation of the common name John. It is now, however, not quite so harmless, for it has become the equivalent in this area of the South-West to chav. This use fits in with the trend of using a colloquial term for a town’s residents for a member of that same town’s youth subculture (see trobo).
See THE CHAVS AND THE CHAV-NOTS, and also CHARVER, CHAV, KAPPA SLAPPER, NED, PIKEY, SCALLY, TROBO
messing around (Suffolk)
Jannicking is an old Suffolk term for wasting time, or messing around. This is a little paradoxical, at least in geographical terms, since its root appears to be in jank, a term born hundreds of miles away in Scotland and meaning ‘to trifle or waste time at work’, and, when used as a noun, ‘a shuffling trick’. Quite how it travelled to Suffolk while bypassing the north of England remains one of dialect’s mysteries. But jannicking, thankfully, looks there to stay.
fair; straightforward; genuine (UK-wide but particularly Northumberland, Hampshire, Norfolk and Cornwall)
The origins of jannock, which can also be jonnick, jannock or jenick, are frustratingly elusive. Recorded from the early nineteenth century, it can be found across Britain and is very much a thriving modern dialect term. The first quotation in the Oxford English Dictionary gives the flavour of it, taken from a dictionary of Craven in the West Riding of the County of York: ‘“That isn’t jannock”, i.e. not fair, a phrase in use when one of the party is suspected of not drinking fairly.’
How to talk like … an East Anglian
This, of course, is an impossibility. Ask any Norfolk ‘bor’ or her Suffolk cousin. East Anglia isn’t an amorphous mass of folk who all speak the same way: the accent of Norwich, they’ll tell you right enough, is a world away from how they speak down in Ipswich. And yet to the outsider the sound is similar, with a never-to-be-mistaken ‘tune’ that makes most imitators blanch. I only ever knew one actor (the late Peter Tuddenham) who really could ‘do’ Norfolk and its combination of idiosyncratic syntax, rich lexicon of local terminology and that rolling, singing melody. This switchback bouncing ride of a tune sweeps the speaker along, deemphasising some syllables while landing heavily on others and often reducing vowels to mere shadows of their standard selves. So horses are ‘HAWsis’, knackered is ‘NECKud’ and roast beef, ‘RUSS beef’.
And even if he or she gets the drift, in East Anglia north and south the outsider’s sure to get confused by the way the locals systematically switch ‘that’ for it. “As the fines’ fish in tuh’sea, a hairr’n’ is …’ says the old skipper about his favourite fish (‘It’s the finest fish in the sea, a herring is’). ‘Thass my bathday today’ (‘It’s my birthday today’) announces another. And so on.
And then there are the vowels. As so often in the dialects of Britain, it’s the way the patterns of vowels have shifted round the mouth and taken each other’s places that gives an accent its distinctiveness. You have only to hear an ‘oo’ sound in words containing ‘u’ to recognise someone’s northern-English origins. So in that big lump of flat land bellying out into the North Sea that is East Anglia, the vowels have again swivelled around. Boats – and there are many in this watery part of the world – are ‘butts’, birthdays are ‘baathdyes’ (‘ur’ rendered as ‘aa’ and ‘ay’ as ‘eye’), and the ‘or’ sound found in that bootiful cathedral city of Norwich hardens up to a long ‘aa’. In consequence its name (benefiting too from the classic East Anglian squeezing of the syllables) routinely becomes simply ‘Narge’.
In East Anglia, you suffer not with a bad back, but with a ‘bed beck’ – the short ‘a’ tightening towards short ‘e’, and as we’ve seen, your payday becomes your ‘pie-dye’ and eye in its own standard English right morphs into ‘oy’ (the ‘Oil of Woight’ would be a Suffolk visitor’s description of the island off Southampton). As for the ‘o’ sound itself, as heard in the standard pronunciation of ‘cold’, it inevitably goes walkabout and not consistently so. A recent survey heard the word pronounced to rhyme with prowled while ‘go’ often comes out as ‘goo’; and as we’ve also heard, those ubiquitous Norfolk boats can also be ‘butts’.
The glottal stop, so familiar a feature to speakers of London English, indeed crops up here again all across the region. But the Norfolk and Suffolk variety combines it rather attractively with that rollercoaster intonation pattern, and injects just a little microsecond of pause that’s just not there in the East End version. The little village of Attleborough is predictably ‘A’’leborough’ but listen to these glottal-stopping whoppers in which temper, jumper and knickers end up sounding more like ‘TEM’uh’, ‘JUUM’uh’ and ‘NI’az’. Here the glottal is accompanied by a tiny puff of air that helps give the bounce to the tune of East Anglian speech.
On the other hand, completely missing from the gentle loping pattern of the Norfolk and Suffolk accent is the crackle of what’s called rhoticity, that is the sounding of ‘r’s where normally they’d be silent (as in the West Country pronunciation of father, mother, butter and so on).
Oh yes, and if you thought that Bernard Matthews was making up the way he described the quality of his turkeys, think again. ‘Bootiful’ – or rather ‘boo’iful’, with a glottal stop instead of a ‘t’ – is standard throughout Suffolk and Norfolk, where the ‘you’ sound in news, student and opportunity routinely becomes the simpler ‘oo’: ‘noos’, ‘stoodunt’ and ‘awpatooni’y’.
But it’s when the accent is combined with the rich and often obscure Norfolk and Suffolk vocabulary that the full glory of this most neglected of British accents takes flight: a visit to the outside toilet in an old Norfolk house was to go to the ‘petty’ (‘PEH’’y’), you greeted your mate as your ‘bor’ (from neighbour) and started almost every sentence with the expletive ‘blust’ as in ‘Cor blust me!’. If you want to interject into a conversation, you still might want to ask your interlocutor to ‘Hold you hard!’
And as for when that east wind comes sweeping in off the North Sea in winter, you could well complain you’re fruz (‘Ahm pairrished fruz’) or frawn (‘Ahm frawn a-cold!’), and you’d greet a female (mawther) friend ‘Hello, my lil’ ole mawther’; ‘little old …’ is a typical semi-affectionate expression that seems to glue itself to most things you want to tell a story about: ‘This lil’ ole butt …’ (equivalent to ‘There was this boat …’) in this part of the world. And of course, most disparaging remarks would condemn whatever was being moaned about as squit (rubbish, nonsense). In Arnold Wesker’s classic Norfolk-set play, Roots, the central character tries valiantly to persuade her mother that classical music isn’t all rubbish; ‘Not all on it’s squit,’ finally admits the mother.
SIMON ELMES
knock-kneed (Yorkshire and Northumberland)
Like pigeon-toed, the implication of jay-legged is that a person has the frail legs of a small bird. Thomas Wilson’s Geordie poem The Oiling of Dicky’s Wig (1843) expresses Dicky’s rural contempt for urban visitors in his description of ‘the jay-legg’d bodies frae the toon’.
See KNOCK KNOCK, and also KAY-LEGGED, KNAP-KNEED
alleyway (Lancashire and Merseyside)
Lancashire’s jigger means a narrow entry between houses, and is linked to such synonymous terms as ginnel. The term also exists in criminal slang, and it is probably among rogues and thieves that it was first used. For them it meant a door (or doorkeeper), a key, a prison (or a cell). Thus the jigger-dubber was a turnkey, i.e. a warder, and to strike a jigger was either to pick a lock, or failing such skills, to break down a door. The etymology is unknown, but the best guess may be Welsh gwddor, a gate. Alternatively it may simply be an alteration of ginnel. It is one of the most characteristic Liverpool words. As one scally brags in Kevin Sampson’s novel Outlaws, ‘I’m the lad that can get them to perform a sex act in a back jigger.’
See BY THE WAY, and also ENOG, ENTRY, GINNEL, LOAN, LOKE, SNICKET, TWITCHEL
If you had just finished writing a book on British dialects, you would be razzored (if you were from Derbyshire), or gone in (if you were from Devon). Wherever you were from, it’s likely the word you would use would be a past participle. Sometimes it will be an obvious one, such as done, gone, jaded, worn. Sometimes, as with jiggered or maggled, it will describe something that you’ve done or that’s been done to you to make you that tired. Sometimes it won’t even be clear what the past participle or its verb means (e.g. faldered, paggered, wabbit), but as long as it follows ‘I am’ and some suitable adverb (totally, utterly, completely, clean, etc.), nobody will be in any doubt as to what you are saying.
Dialect offers a selection of local terms that is anything but weary. They include bauch (Scotland), clammed (Wiltshire), defeat (Scotland), done in (South and East Midlands), done off (Durham), done out (South and Isle of Man), done up (chiefly in the South), faldered (Lincolnshire, Yorkshire), fornyward (Scotland), gone in (Devon), jaded (Staffordshire), jaded out (Yorkshire), jossed up (Lancashire), paggered (Yorkshire), paid out (Yorkshire and North-East), pootled (Cumbria), razzored (Derbyshire), bellowsed (Somerset), lagged out (Berkshire), mucked (Cheshire), pegged out (Westmorland), played out (Yorkshire), pole-fagged (Lancashire), spunned up (Wiltshire), spun out (Somerset), tewed out (Cumberland), weared out (Warwickshire, Devon) and wore out (Buckinghamshire).
See also BLETHERED, BUSHWHA, DIRT DEEN, JIGGERED, LAMPERED, MAGGLED, WABBIT
tired (Yorkshire, Lancashire and the Midlands)
Like wabbit, jiggered (usually with up, as in ‘I’m jiggered up’) suggests a state of extreme tiredness, almost of being ‘done for’ and completely devitalised. It may be based on the word jig, although no definitive origin has been traced.
According to the OED, jiggered dates back to 1862. It originated in Yorkshire, and it retains evidence of strong regional use, notably in Lancashire, the Midlands and in Westmorland. It also seems to be common in Scottish English, and features in the works, for example, of the novelists Jeff Torrington and Alan Warner.
Jiggered is also used as a vague substitute for a profane oath or swear-word, as in ‘well, I’m jiggered’. In Dickens’s Great Expectations, Pip reports the labourer Dolge Orlick as saying ‘I’m jiggered if I don’t see you home.’ In this sense, jiggered is probably serving as a euphemism for buggered.
See ALL PAGGERED AND POOTLED, and also BLETHERED, BUSHWHA, DIRT DEEN, LAMPERED, MAGGLED, WABBIT
underhand practices; manipulation of equipment (Scotland and the North)
The charm of jiggery-pokery is such that it often features among Britons’ favourite words. Its bouncing rhythm is reminiscent of the language used with a child, working in the same way as higgledy-piggledy does.
The word is first recorded by the OED in 1893 as part of a glossary of Wiltshire dialect, but the English Dialect Dictionary also quotes an Oxford example: ‘I was fair took in with that fellow’s jiggery-pokery over that pony.’ It very probably comes from an equally onomatopoeic Scots phrase of the seventeenth century, joukery-pawkery, in which joukery meant ‘underhand dealing or deceit’, and the whole ‘clever trickery’ or ‘jugglery’. Joukery in turn comes from the verb jouk, which once meant to ‘dodge’ or ‘skulk’. Its origin is not proven but it may be linked to the term jink and to the American football term juke, ‘to make a move designed to deceive an opponent’. Pawky is a word still in use in northern England, Scotland and Ireland, and means ‘artful, sly and shrewd’ or, more recently, ‘to have a sardonic sense of humour’.
neat; smart; slender (Scotland and northern England)
A jimpey was a short gown worn by a cottage woman. It lacked skirts and reached only the middle of the legs. It is possible that this, which is the root of jimp meaning graceful and neat, is in turn linked to the modern jumper, which was originally a kind of short coat worn by men in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
fleshy, hanging cheeks (Shropshire)
This wonderfully onomatopoeic word says it all. Joblocks are the pendulous wattles seen in turkeys and, in human form, the chubby cheeks of a small child or the fat cheeks of an adult. The verb jobble, now obsolete, once meant ‘moving unevenly like a choppy sea’.
nerves or trepidation (Dorset)
This nicely onomatopoeic term comes from the dialect noun jaup, which means the breaking of a wave, and thus, more figuratively, a ‘shaking up’ of something. There is also a verb, to jaup, which means ‘to splash or to spatter with mud or water’. The word joppety-joppety is simply an imitation of the sound reduplicated, representing the jagged spurts of panic. (Jaup, incidentally, is also at the root of Dorset’s jowpment, a meat stew or hash.)