r
ANGRY; BAD-TEMPERED (THE North-East)
Radge is just a form of the word rage, and it is one which betrays its origins in the Scottish Borders. The earliest example in the Oxford English Dictionary is from the English side, Cumberland, in the mid-nineteenth century, although from later in the same century it had become much more common in Scots, and is still found there as well as in the North-East today.
Radgy is a distinctive word in contemporary Scots literature, to be found for example in the works of Irvine Welsh, Ian Rankin and many others. The alternative form radgie is also found in Scotland, but was also earlier recorded in the East Midlands, suggesting that it originally was indeed a Midlands word.
impulsive, impetuous, headstrong (northern England and Scotland)
As they say north of the border, ‘These ranstamphis prickmadandies … brag and blaw sae muckle anent themsels.’ Indeed they do, and ram-stam, whether of a prickmadandy (‘a braggart or blowhard’) or anyone else, means ‘headlong’, ‘precipitous’ or ‘impetuous’. It also, perhaps predictably, refers to the strongest form of homebrewed beer. And the tongue-twisting ramstamphis means ‘rough, blunt, unceremonious or noisy’.
The Oxford English Dictionary’s first evidence for ram-stam is from a poem by Robert Burns in 1786. In 1818 Sir Walter Scott wrote, in Rob Roy, ‘The least we’ll get, if we gang ramstam in on them, will be a broken head.’ The origin is elusive, but the prefix ram is generally an intensifier (in such wonderful words as, for example, ramfeezled, meaning ‘confused or muddled’), while stam means ‘to walk with a quick, heavy tread’, and so with purpose. The Cornish take on ramstam is arguably even better: ram-bang, meaning ‘headlong’.
rubbish of any kind (northern England and Scotland)
In Derbyshire rammel means ‘worthless rubbish’, while in North Staffordshire it denotes ‘a mongrel dog’. In both cases, its extended meaning is of something unwanted and thrown away. Its origin, possibly, is in Old French ramaille, ‘branches that have been cut from the tree’, although there is no provable link and it may well be that this rammel is quite another word. Other dialectal meanings include ‘loose, sandy, stony, hard or barren soil’. A rammel cundy is a drain filled with loose stones and as an adjective used of an animal rammel means ‘big-boned’ or ‘scraggy’, and, of a person, ‘rather rough’. In Nottinghamshire it is possible to hear the powerful and dismissive threesome piffle, rammel and twaddle.
ugly; inferior (now UK-wide but originally London)
Rank has meant second-rate, inferior or foul-smelling since the late seventeenth century. It is derived from the standard English term rank, meaning ‘rotten’ (usually of meat), ‘rancid’ or ‘strong-smelling’. It is likely to be an import from Caribbean English, where it is primarily used as a pejorative, and a particularly severe one at that. The root, of course, remains the same: ‘smelly’.
See THE MIRROR CRACKED, and also BUTTERS, DUFFY, FUSTY, LAIDLY, MINGING, MUNTER, OBZOCKY, SKANK
Teardown tearaways: the active child
As any parent knows, an active child is a mixed blessing. At least linguistically there is a wealth of terms to describe this double-edged sword.
Active is found in all regions of the country, as is the similarly standard lively. The most common local alternative is wick, which can be found throughout most of the North. All of these are fairly positive in meaning, suggesting that the child is full of energy. Lish, lissom, brave, fresh, frim, frisky and spry, all accord with active, lively and wick. But others, like bothersome, mischiefful, riving and wiggy-arsed suggest that the adults’ energy levels are not up to those of the children. Adjectival phrases are a feature of this group of words, again with distinctions of tone and register. On the go is common, especially in the East Midlands and the East Riding of Yorkshire, while equivalent, but less positive, phrases like on the wander and on the fidget are also recorded.
And so across the country you can still find: bothersome (Isle of Man), brave (Dorset), fidgety (all of England except Northumbria), fresh (Northumberland), frim (Leicestershire), frisky (Northumberland), hardy (Ireland and Newfoundland), lissom (Berkshire, Wiltshire, Staffordshire), litty (Somerset and Dorset), mischiefful (Essex, Wiltshire), mischievous (Leicestershire, Somerset and Norfolk), pert (central southern England), quick (Staffordshire), riving (Yorkshire), sprack (South-West, especially Wiltshire and Somerset), spry (Dorset), upstrigolous (Somerset), wiggy-arsed (Wiltshire); (full of) ganning on (Northumberland), full of vim (London), on the fidget, on the rouk, on the wander (Yorkshire); as a noun, meaning ‘an active child’: chraddle-head (Cornwall), rake (Berkshire) and finally little lubber, rummager and tear-down (Lincolnshire).
Quite a handful.
See also LISH, SKOPADIDDLE UNEASY, WAKEN, WICK, YAP
an open ditch or water course (the South-West)
Low-lying areas of England and Wales have often been drained artificially, and the man-made drainage channels are known as reens. The term is used widely in a number of counties, although it has a number of different spellings, including rean, rhyne and rhine. The idea for all is that of running water, hence the French term rhume for a cold, and, of course, the river Rhine.
giddy, light-headed (south of Scotland; now rare)
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, James Hogg, a farmer and poet from Ettrick in south-east Scotland, followed his fellow poet from rural Ayrshire in the South-West, Robert Burns, into Edinburgh literary society. In 1815, another poet of the vogue for dialect poetry that Burns started, James Ruickbie, wrote of Hogg, ‘Lang about Ettrick may ye toddle, And clew a poet’s reezy noddle.’ Clew means ‘scratch’, noddle ‘the back of the head’ and reezy, ‘giddy’, was one of the local words captured by this poetic movement. By the mid-twentieth century, it was rare and restricted to the Selkirk area.
See GOING SWIMMINGLY, and also MAZY, SWIMY
money (Yorkshire; now rare)
This is probably a variant of rivets, which is first recorded as a slang term for money in the London underworld of the mid-nineteenth century. Referring mainly to coins, it is an extended use of rivet in its usual meaning of a ‘short bolt for fastening together metal plates’. In its subsequent use, it largely retains a certain criminal or at least dodgy feel to it, so it’s quite surprising to find that it was widespread in the West Riding of Yorkshire and in the areas of Lancashire bordering it in the 1880s and 1890s. Later evidence from these areas is hard to find, and the word provides an excellent example both of the potentially evanescent nature of slang and of the difficulties and unpredictabilities of trying to research the spread and development of non-standard language.
See MONEY TALKS – OR DOES IT? and also ACKERS, GELT, MORGS, SPONDULICKS
stream, rivulet (north-west Midlands)
Rindle is a variant, with what linguists call an intrusive letter (‘d’ in this case), of an Anglo-Saxon word rinnel, which itself was a variant of runnel. The original word comes from run, as in ‘running water’. Rindle is first recorded in the mid-sixteenth century, and within a century or so it had become localised to the area around Staffordshire, Cheshire, west Derbyshire and south Lancashire. The form rundle, harking back to the original word, has also been recorded in Cheshire. Runnel was still around in the early twentieth century when it was recorded in the English Dialect Dictionary (1905), chiefly in Yorkshire.
See WATER WATER EVERYWHERE, and also BECK, BURN, NAILBOURN, PRILL, SIKE, STELL