p
A DECORATED EGG at Easter (northern England)
The egg is a pagan symbol of the renewal of life – an apparently inert object from which new life emerges. It was rapidly adopted by early Christian tradition as a symbol of Christ’s resurrection and, hence, of Easter. Easter eggs, however, only became chocolate in the twentieth century. Before that a much older tradition held. Hard-boiled eggs were painted in bright colours and then rolled down a hill or slope before being recovered and eaten. The painting of eggs in this way remains a common Eastertide occupation of schoolchildren, especially in the United States, but the tradition of rolling is now much rarer. So common was it once in northern areas of England that the day the rolling took place (usually Easter Monday, but also Easter Sunday or even the Tuesday) was known as bowl-egged Sunday, roll-egg day or bowling-egg day. It is in the North as well that the only common regional alternative to the standard term is recorded – pace egg.
Pace is a Scottish and northern English variant of Pasch, meaning Passover or Easter, which is itself derived from the Latin word pascha (with the same meanings). Pasch is pronounced with a ‘k’ at the end and the dropping of the ‘k’ is typical of Scotland and the very north of England. Pace egg is recorded in the south of Scotland, Northumberland, Cumbria, Yorkshire and Lancashire.
As with Easter eggs in the rest of England, pace eggs were traditionally rolled down a hill or slope on Easter Sunday or Easter Monday. Pace egg also came to be a term for Easter itself with Easter Sunday being known as pace egg day. Pace-egging, meanwhile, described the egg-rolling tradition and the performance of traditional Easter mummers’ plays. These plays were known as pace egg plays and were common throughout the region. In fact, many local pace egg plays have been revived in recent decades.
to pant (the South and South-West)
Recorded throughout the South-West and as far east as Berkshire and Hampshire, pank is the most common regional alternative to pant, but it is also the most difficult to explain. The tempting assumption that it is simply a version of pant is probably wrong, because that alternation of ‘t’ and ‘k’ would be unique, and is therefore doubtful. Perhaps it represents not a variant but a deliberate alteration of pant to increase its imitation of the sound we make when we breathe fast and loud.
See A PILE OF PANTS, and also THOCK, TIFT
splay-footed (Lancashire)
The meaning here seems to be ‘with feet spread out like paste’. The word is first used in 1607 by Thomas Dekker and John Webster in their play Northward Hoe, where it is a general term of abuse: ‘You pasty-footed Rascalls.’ It is possible that the recent Lancastrian use retains some negative connotations too, because at the end of the nineteenth century, a pasty-foot is recorded in West Yorkshire, referring to a ghost, or a tramp.
See NO MEAN FEET, and also DEW-FOOTED
a word used by children to declare truce in a game (the South-East)
Pax is Latin for ‘peace’. The word has literally hundreds of equivalents in children’s games up and down the country. In northern England you might hear barley or kings (said while crossing your fingers). In Ipswich, if you don’t want to be kissed during a game of kiss-chase, you say exsie, while in London, as well as pax, you could say faynights. In Scotland you can choose from an entire lexicon, including barrels, bees, tibs, dibs, dubbies, peas, pearls, parleys and paxman. Other colourful alternatives from the South include creamos, creamy olivers, scribs, scrunch, ollyoxalls, double queenie and fingers.
pale, sickly (Scotland)
Peelie-wallie, or peely-wally, means ‘pale, sickly or ill-looking’. It may have arisen because of its sound, which imitates a feeble whine, and there is in fact a dialect word pee-wee which means ‘whining’ or ‘small’.
The second part of the term, wallie or wally, is probably related to the word wallydrag, which according to the English Dialect Dictionary describes ‘a feeble, ill-grown person or animal, or a worthless, slovenly person, especially a woman’. One example from the OED from 1879 begins with ‘yon bit pernicketty wallydraggle!’ While wallydrag dates back to the sixteenth century, though, peelie-wallie itself didn’t begin to appear until the 1830s. It remains an evocative term in Scottish dialect for feeling under the weather.
How to talk like … a Brummie
Well, forget trying to make people love your accent, for a start. The speech of Birmingham, the Black Country and the West Midlands in general has repeatedly over many years come out bottom or next to bottom in polls of Britain’s favourite accents, usually alongside Scouse.
Just what it is that people find to object to is actually hard to determine. It’s an urban form of speech, and along with the accents of London, Bristol and other big conurbations, Brummie can be a bit flat. And it’s a rather nasal accent, of course, which can sound as though the speaker’s suffering with a heavy cold.
But I guess above all what marks out the accent of the Birmingham area most of all is its upwardly inflected intonation pattern and flattened vowel sounds, most of which seem to have played musical chairs in the mouth. So ‘i’ shifts to ‘oi’ (right pronounced as ‘roight’), ‘a’ (may) becomes ‘my’ and ‘o’ (low) moves over to ‘aow’ (as in standard mouth). Long ‘ee’ goes south towards long ‘a’ such that treat becomes ‘trayt’.
Sometimes this great Birmingham vowel shift can prove confusing, as Professor Clive Upton of Leeds University, the country’s foremost expert in regional English and himself a Brummie, has observed. With the standard ‘oi’ sound becoming something akin to a triphthongised ‘aoi’ sort of noise, ‘If you hear someone say that someone’s got a “naoice vaoice” it’ll be hard to say whether they’ve got a nice voice or a nice vice,’ he says.
So when encountering a female chum, your matey Brummie, using the local dialect term ‘bab’ for girl might well say ‘All right, bab?’ except that this will emerge something like ‘Oroit, bab?’ And if you’re feeling a bit negative and don’t want to do something, in Birmingham this shifts along from ‘don’t’ to ‘daynt’. And sometimes these mobile Midlands vowels can make comprehension doubly tricky for the non-habitué of New Street, as she’s informed that her male friend has just been to the new Bullring shopping centre to buy some ‘stroids’. Stroids, she wonders? And then the Perry Bar penny drops and she performs the necessary double translation: ‘stroids’ are strides and strides are (as in parts of northern England) trousers.
And that connection with northern English is not fortuitous: the Birmingham ‘u’ belongs firmly to the same family as its Yorkshire and Lancastrian cousins, and makes it not so ‘toof ter’oonderstand, this Broomie’ when you lend a northern ear to the sound. Likewise that useful little intervening ‘r’ that’s a familiar feature to lovers of Lanky dialect appearing where no ‘r’ is ever printed turns up here from Edgbaston to Erdington as in ‘gerroff’ for get off and ‘gerraway’ for that expression of surprise, get away.
So the sound of Birmingham belongs to itself, with plenty of nods to its neighbours to the north, but it also very much doesn’t display any of the rubicund ‘r’ sounds that we associate with the cider orchards of the South-West, which also spread up into the rhotic areas of the south-west Midlands from the Gloucestershire borders. So a Brummie, remembering the rougher tougher time of a working-class childhood in the city, will say it was ‘a very haad loife’ (hard life), unlike his cousin from Devon who’d remember that ‘life wuz ‘aRRd’. Another sound that’s never on the page but which creeps into the way words are pronounced in the city is the intrusive ‘k’, such that the place is often heard talked of by locals as ‘Birmingkham’.
So Brum talk is characterful, urban, distinctive. It does amazing things with vowels in so radical a way that only an Ulsterman would find the changes unsurprising, and yet along with Liverpudlian and Belfast the speech of England’s second city rarely attracts praise, but often mockery and even shame. As one Brummie admitted to a dialect researcher: ‘I watch the tallay, an oi see soombody interviewing a Birmingham person on the tallay and oi think, God, that’s awful!’
A passenger gets off the train at New Street in Birmingham and is immediately enveloped in the talk: ‘Worroh!’ says one local in greeting; ‘Oorroit!’ replies another. The taxi driver, waiting in line for fares, complains that it’s parky (chilly) this morning, though his passenger’s thinking to herself he’s a bit of a morkins (idiot) for being grumpy (or mardy, as she puts it). But despite the uncomfortable atmosphere, both cabbie and fare are happy to bid farewell to each other with an exchange of ‘Tarrah’ and ‘Trarabit’ (see you later). ‘But he had a fayce loik a bostid boot’ she complains to her mom at hum (home) later, ‘he were that ugly! Spent the whole journey canting (talking), and waving his fat hands about’ (or donnies, she calls them). Her mum, fed up with her childish attitude, ends the exchange with a curt ‘Stop being such a tittybabby.’
SIMON ELMES
a crumpet (northern England and the Midlands)
The pikelet, the crumpet by many alternative geographical names, is variously defined, at least in the UK, as ‘a thin kind of crumpet’, a type of ‘small round teacake made of fine flour’, and ‘a muffin’. In Australia, whence it presumably travelled with the early immigrants, it is a type of drop scone. On any account it is a tasty abbreviation of the Welsh bara pyglyd, ‘pitchy bread’, which may be a reference to its colour.
a term of insult (originally the Isle of Sheppey but now UK-wide)
The word turnpike began life meaning just that: a spiked barrier fixed across a road as a defence against sudden attack, especially one from men on horseback – who would have been carrying pikes. Gradually it became used to describe any barrier, including those of water, but by the seventeenth century was best known as the abbreviation of turnpike road, a road that had a barrier at which a toll must be paid before one could pass through it.
Many people rode and walked the turnpike, among them the Gypsies, a name itself based on Egyptian, a mistaken reference to the country from which they had supposedly come (the actual one being India). Gypsies had a poor and often unfounded reputation. Their nicknames reflected it, among them pikey-man, shortened to pikey and first used by locals on the Isle of Sheppey to describe the nomadic, allegedly disruptive strangers who turned up for the annual harvest. Pikey has more recently surfaced as one of the many synonyms for the regrettable term chav, the current term of choice for Britain’s social underclass.
See THE CHAVS AND THE CHAV-NOTS, and also CHARVER, CHAV, JANNER, KAPPA SLAPPER, NED, SCALLY, TROBO
a tidal creek (south-west England and Pembrokeshire)
A number of place names on both the English and Welsh banks of the Severn estuary include the word pill, such as Magor Pill in Monmouthshire, and Black Pill near Swansea. The word derives from the Old English pyll, meaning ‘a pool or tidal creek’.
drunk, intoxicated (Scotland and Northern Ireland)
A variant of pissed, pished is recorded continuously in Scots for all the various senses of piss since the renownedly earthy poet of the very early sixteenth century, William Dunbar (the first writer to use the f-word). It is also found in the fifteenth century in the north of England. For example, while in general English a dandelion is sometimes called a pissabed, in nineteenth-century Scotland, it could be a pish-the-bed (in both cases because of the well-known diuretic properties of the plant). The sense ‘drunk, intoxicated’ is recorded in the twentieth century, following on from the same extension of pissed in England in the late nineteenth, and is now in ordinary informal use. The novelist Irvine Welsh is an especially prolific user of the word, both in its literal sense: ‘Pished yir keks, Franco? Rents asks him, pointing at a wet patch oan the faded blue denim’ (Trainspotting), and its metaphorical: ‘We were pished senseless before we knew it’ (Glue).
See LIQUID LUNCHES, and also BLOOTERED, DRUCKEN, DRUFFEN, FLUTHERED, MALLETED, PUGGLED, SKIMMISHED, STOCIOUS
to play truant (originally New England, now across the UK)
Now well known in England, this synonym for playing truant originated at the end of the nineteenth century as a regional American use from Pennsylvania. It was a development on an earlier phrase to hook Jack, used in New England and especially Massachusetts, with Jack simply being used as a generic term for someone who might hook school – a later version to be found in Maryland and Virginia. The verb hook means ‘to steal’; first recorded in the seventeenth century, it was principally an American word by the nineteenth. This group of hook phrases represents, therefore, an American parallel to British formations arising from steal words, like nick and mitch and, indeed, to steal away.
See BUNKING AND PLUNKING, and also BUNK OFF, DOG, MITCH, NICK OFF, PLUNK, SAG, SKIDGE, SKIVE, TWAG, WAG
to wade through water or mud (Northumberland and Scotland)
Think plodge, and you think of the juvenile delights of rubber boots immersed in sucking mud, and further of the wonderful Northumberland phrase plodging in the clarts, ‘to paddle in the mud’. In addition comes plodger, perhaps even more pleasing a word, which means ‘a paddler or wader’ (in water as well as mud) and plodgy, a description of deep snow that has yet to be marked by the imprint any foot.
See MUD, MUD, GLORIOUS MUD, and also CLART, SLOB, SLUB, SLUCH
to play truant (Scotland)
Plunk is first recorded in mid-western Scotland and has been common ever since, mainly in the southern half of the country. Nowadays, to plunk it and especially to plunk school are the usual expressions. One Scottish journalist in 1997 recalled that ‘Me and my mates didn’t plunk school except to go and see Rangers playing Moscow Dynamo.’
See BUNKING AND PLUNKING, and also BUNK OFF, DOG, MITCH, NICK OFF, PLAY HOOKEY, SAG, SKIDGE, SKIVE, TWAG, WAG
tadpole (the South-East)
Pollywog is a synonym for tadpole, and makes its first lexicographical appearance in 1440, when the Promptuarium Parvulorum (a terrifyingly sober-sounding dictionary aimed at schools) offers ‘Polwygle, wyrme’. The term exists throughout the British Isles, and is also to be found in North America. Spellings are various: porwygle, poddywig, periowiggle and pollywriggle among them. As far as can be established, the polly part comes from the fifteenth-century word poll which referred to the head of a person or animal, while wog seems to be linked to woggle, itself a variant of waggle (i.e. of the tadpole’s tail).
stream, rivulet (south-west Midlands and south-east Wales)
First recorded in the works of the Herefordshire writer John Davies, in the early seventeenth century, prill is a word that has always been associated with the counties either side of the southern half of the Welsh border. It is probably derived from pirl, an older word with the same meaning.
See WATER WATER EVERYWHERE, and also BECK, BURN, NAILBOURN, RINDLE, SIKE, STELL
Streams and rivulets are an integral part of the countryside and have for centuries been vital to local communities as sources of water, boundary markers, and so on. Part of their usefulness is precisely their localness, their separateness from the rivers which acted as the main thoroughfares of rural life. As one nineteenth-century writer said, ‘Each gorge and valley has its beck.’ He, William Black, was Glaswegian, so he might also have said burn. If he had been from the Welsh valleys, he may well have said prill. If he had been from the Derbyshire Dales, perhaps rindle. And so on.
The words to be found are strikingly old. Many are of Anglo-Saxon origin and very few are not established by 1700. To the modern, urbanised eye, they also look old: eas, pinnocks, holls and sikes are the kind of thing we expect to find in the countryside, or perhaps more accurately in a nineteenth-century novel set in the countryside, such as William Black’s The Strange Adventures of a Phaeton, quoted above.
The usefulness of these words, however, continues for the people who actually live among them. Take a winding path around the country’s byways and you will find: brook (South), burn (Scotland and northern England), creek, trickle and dyke (Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Oxfordshire, Norfolk, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire and Kent), riverlet (Kent), ditch (Norfolk, Essex, Berkshire and Hertfordshire), canal, lake and prill (Wales and the Welsh marches in Monmouthshire), beck (North), dingle (Herefordshire), drill (Kent), drain (Norfolk and Lincolnshire), sike (Durham, Cumbria and Yorkshire), stell (Durham), rindle (Staffordshire, Derbyshire and Cheshire), ea (Lincolnshire), nailbourn (Kent), gill and gote (Yorkshire) and holl (Norfolk).
See also BECK, BURN, NAILBOURN, PRILL, RINDLE, SIKE, STELL
to gossip (Durham)
Pross, yet another term for empty chitchat, with its adjective prossy, ‘talkative’, and the phrase hold pross, ‘to have a gossip or chat’, is no more than a dialect version of standard English’s prose. Prose has been through various meanings through the ages, usually relating to technical aspects of writing, but it has settled down today to mean simply ‘spoken or (usually) written language that is not subjected to any form of poetic rules’. To prose as a verb can be found regularly in the sort of early twentieth-century public school tales where it is synonymous with jaw, and it means ‘to sermonise or to preach’. It is paradoxical, perhaps, that the underlying essence of prose has always been simplicity, clarity, the state of being matter-of-fact, while gossipy pross, on the whole, prefers the supposed matters to the actual facts.
See ALL THE LOCAL GOSSIP, and also CANK, CANT, CHAMRAG, CLISH-MA-CLAVER, COOSE, JAFFOCK, JANGLE, NEIGHBOUR, TALE-PYET
an evil spirit or demon; a small amount (Scotland and the Midlands)
What links such place names as Puxton, Worcestershire and Pucklechurch in Gloucestershire and Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream? It is the word puck, meaning primarily ‘a malevolent spirit or demon’, a ‘bugbear’ or ‘bogey’, and used as the name of the mischievous fairy in Shakespeare’s play. Puckle is simply a variation of puck and means the very same thing. As for the village names, we are probably looking at the diminutive, still in Glaswegian use, puckle, meaning small. Pucklechurch is self-evident, but Puxton was originally Puclancyrce: again picking up on the ‘small church’ idea. Puck itself seems to be linked to a variety of Scandinavian words all meaning a wicked spirit, a goblin or even the devil. In a weaker sense, it can also simply mean ‘a mischief-maker’. It is this same Puck that is to be found in the title of Rudyard Kipling’s much-loved collection of children’s stories Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906).
crazy; crazy-drunk (Scotland)
A variant of poggled, the word puggled is based on the Hindi noun pagal, which means a ‘madman’ or ‘idiot’ and which was absorbed into English in the 1820s. A century later, both poggled and puggled were taken up in the Army as slang terms for crazy. The development of the sense of ‘drunk’, as in ‘mad-drunk’, was perhaps inevitable. They continue to be used particularly in Scotland.
The Anglo-Indian resonance of the word, and its origin in pagal, is evident in the final page of the Rudyard Kipling story ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’: when the children have been reunited with their mother one of them says, ‘Mother’s never angry … She’d just say “you’re a little pagal”’. Meanwhile, the Oxford English Dictionary includes a quote from Brian Aldiss’s humorous novel of military life in the Far East during the Second World War: ‘A woman in this bloody dump? You’re going puggle, Page, that’s your trouble! Too much tropical sun.’
See LIQUID LUNCHES, and also BLOOTERED, DRUCKEN, DRUFFEN, FLUTHERED, MALLETED, PISHED, SKIMMISHED, STOCIOUS
soft shoes (the Midlands, Yorkshire and the North-West)
Pumps have been shoes since the sixteenth century, far longer than any other word now used to describe gym shoes. They have not, of course, been gym shoes for that long! The word has been used to describe a variety of close-fitting, slip-on, low-heeled shoe: from slippers, to acrobats’ shoes, to dancing shoes, and then, in the twentieth century, to school gym shoes. In this last use pumps comes a close second after plimsolls, and is standard throughout the Midlands, Yorkshire and the North-West.
See ANYONE FOR SANNIES? and also DAPS, GUTTIES, SANNIES
interfering, meddling (the West Country)
The adjective and noun pussyvanting is defined by the OED as ‘an ineffectual activity or pointless bustle’ (movement, that is, not the garment). It has more recently, and particularly in Cornwall and Devon, gained the added meaning of ‘following someone around (usually of the opposite sex) in an irritating manner’. Its origins are not entirely clear: certainly there seems to be a play on gallivanting, meaning ‘to gad about in a showy fashion’, usually to amuse or entice the opposite sex. But why pussy? The cat’s infinite capacity for wrapping itself round a person’s legs is one suggestion. Alternatively puss and pussy have long since meant ‘a hare’ in dialect, and so perhaps the suggestion is of the hare’s darting, zig-zag movements under pursuit. Natural history aside, it’s also worth noting the English Dialect Dictionary’s account of what may or may not be a folk etymology, based on the arrival in the seventeenth-century West Country of poursuivants: crown agents who went around the country assessing those entitled to bear arms. Their interference would certainly not always be welcome.