s
TO PLAY TRUANT (Liverpool)
Sagging can still be heard in Liverpool as a code for skipping school. In Iona and Peter Opie’s fascinating collection of the Lore and Language of Schoolchildren in the 1950s, the authors state emphatically that sagging ‘is definitely the prevailing term [for playing truant] amongst delinquents in all parts of Liverpool’. The TV dramatist Alan Bleasdale also uses sagging in his Merseyside dramas. The origin is difficult to divine, but there may be a link with the Danish word sakke, which means ‘to lag behind’. Or it may be a local development of the more widespread and earlier wag, which was common in Lancashire by the end of the nineteenth century.
See BUNKING AND PLUNKING, and also BUNK OFF, DOG, MITCH, NICK OFF, PLUNK, PLAY HOOKEY, SKIDGE, SKIVE, TWAG, WAG
soft shoes (Scotland and the North-East)
Sandshoes, or sannies for short, have been around since the middle of the nineteenth century. This is the standard word in Scotland, and is also used in the North-East as far south as Hull. It describes shoes used for walking on sand, especially beach shoes with canvas uppers and soles of gutta-percha or hemp, which greatly resemble the traditional school gym shoe. In Glasgow the term is often used more generally for trainers, such as some ‘mincy wee running sannies’ worn by someone getting on the wrong side of Rab C. Nesbitt.
See ANYONE FOR SANNIES? and also DAPS, GUTTIES, PUMPS
to make tea (chiefly Staffordshire, Shropshire, Worcestershire and Yorkshire)
Although recorded sporadically all down the east coast from Northumberland to Kent, the epicentre of the use of scald runs from Staffordshire down to Worcestershire. In this area, it is used both transitively (‘to scald the tea’) and intransitively (‘I’ll go and scald’). Yorkshire is another area of common use, but only the transitive sense (‘I scalded the tea’) is recorded there. In the light of synonyms relating the making of tea to the brewing of beer, the fact that the English Dialect Dictionary collected scald in Yorkshire meaning ‘to pour boiling water on malt in brewing’ is probably significant in tracking down the term’s origin, although evidence is a little too scanty to judge for certain.
See KETTLE’S ON, and also BIRLE, EMPT, HELL, MASK, MASH, SOAK, TEEM, WET
self-assured or roguish young person (chiefly Liverpool)
Shortened from scallywag, scally is used throughout Lancashire to describe a young working-class male, but in Liverpool it carries particular connotations of cockiness or of being a bit of a chancer. It frequently has less negative connotations than the other words employed to describe urban youth, at least when used by the mainstream media. The scally is definitely not a chav, but very much a rogue, and therefore, potentially at least, loveable. You don’t have to look far to find most successful working-class Scousers described as scallies, especially musicians like the Beatles and footballers like Robbie Fowler and Steven Gerrard.
Scallywag itself has a lovely history. The term began as scurryvag, which came from a Latin phrase scurra vagus meaning ‘a wandering fool or jester’. In London the word was used to describe a beggar or ‘scurrilous vagrant’, which in turn became trade union slang for a man who refuses to work or a political opportunist. A rogue has probably never had a more colourful name.
See THE CHAVS AND THE CHAV-NOTS, and also CHARVER, CHAV, JANNER, KAPPA SLAPPER, NED, PIKEY, TROBO
To describe tea as brewing originally involved a direct analogy to the act of brewing beer. Brew is an Anglo-Saxon word, used by Alfred the Great, so beer had been brewed in England for almost a millennium by the time tea began to be in the nineteenth century. Brew quickly became established as the standard term for the process and dominant in the South, South-East and East Anglia. It developed both transitive (‘brew the tea’) and intransitive senses (‘the tea is brewing’). Further north, the specific part of the brewing process most akin to making tea, the infusion of the malt in water, was used as the point of departure for these senses. It was known as mashing from the Midlands up to Yorkshire, and as masking in the north of England and in Scotland. In the South-West, the analogy with brewing was not used, with the more straightforwardly descriptive soak and wet gaining currency. In Hampshire the term is bide and draw, while in Warwickshire they steep.
Words for pouring tea, meanwhile, don’t show quite the same level of variation as those for making or brewing it, but the variation they do show follows a very similar pattern. As with brew, pour is the dominant word in general across the South. In Cornwall they ent; in Cheshire they lade or laden. Teem is dominant in the North and covers broadly the same area as mash with two exceptions – the West Midlands and an area roughly corresponding to the East Riding of Yorkshire. Further north of that, where mask is used for brewing, pour returns. The South-West adds a few extras: empt, hell and shoot are found there instead of pour, just as soak and wet are for brew.
A fair lexicon, then, but then for such an important British pastime you wouldn’t expect anything else.
See also BIRLE, EMPT, HELL, MASH, MASK, SCALD, SOAK, TEEM, WET
mist; something fanciful or unknown (Scotland)
A Scotch mist is, literally, a kind of thick mist characteristic of the Highlands, and it is mentioned as far back as the mid-seventeenth century. In Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814), the hero’s aunt was said to have charged her nephew to ‘beware of Scotch mists, which, she had heard, would wet an Englishman through and through … and, above all, to wear flannel next to his skin’.
From these literal beginnings the term also came to be used allusively, to denote something insubstantial or unreal, and also sarcastically to imply something that someone has imagined or not properly understood. Such a state might well be induced by the third sense of Scotch mist, which is a drink of whisky served with a twist of lemon.
Liverpudlian (UK-wide)
cold (the South and South-West)
Shrammed, meaning ‘cold or freezing’, thus all of a shram, has been used throughout the rural south of England as far east as Sussex since the seventeenth century. The words of one Isle of Wight local were recorded at the beginning of the twentieth century: ‘Let’s get avore the fire, vor I be ver’ neer shrammed.’ As time has gone on, it has become more and more localised in the west.
Shrammed may not appear to be linked to the shrimp, but it is. The root for both is an Old English verb scrimman, meaning ‘to be paralysed’ or ‘to deprive someone of movement through a contraction of the muscles’ (which in turn provided shrim, ‘to shrink or shrivel’). The idea of shrinking works on various levels: in addition to the weather-induced sort, there is a link to scrimp, as in scrimp and save and, as promised, to the shrimp, which started life in Middle English as meaning any diminutive creature – so small, in fact, that it looks as though it’s shrunk.
We can find another link in West Somerset’s scram, meaning ‘abnormally small or insignificant-looking’, ‘puny’ – hence ‘a scram hand’ describes a withered hand.
Finally, scram-handed and scrammed mean ‘to be paralysed’ and, to come full circle, ‘to be benumbed’ (with cold).
See BLOWING HOT AND COLD – MOSTLY COLD, and also NESH, NITHERED, TATERS
safe (Scotland)
Glasgow’s sicker, meaning ‘safe’, is no more than a pronunciation of the standard English term ‘secure’ – this and other versions of the term go all the way back to the ninth century. The ultimate root is Latin securus, literally ‘free of care’. In Northumberland sicker once meant ‘wary’ or ‘sly’, and was frequently prefixed by gey, an intensifier, meaning ‘very’, ‘considerably’, giving ‘he’s a gey sicker yen’.
How to talk like … an Ulsterman
There’s a corny old joke told in Belfast about the boy who is found crying his eyes out beside a river. A passer-by enquires what’s upset him, and the boy replies, ‘Well, ah’ve droppt mi meiyt; ’s in the revver.’ The man jumps into the river, but emerges empty-handed: ‘Scuse me, ah can’t feind yer wee frieynd.’ The boy starts to laugh, protesting that he hadn’t been talking about his friend (mate) but his sandwich filling (meat): ‘Ah said it’s mi meiyt, nawt mi meiyt as in “huyman”,’ he says. ‘It’s the meiyt outta mi sandwich!’ Boom-boom.
Yes, well it’s not a great joke, I agree, but what it does tell you about the way Ulstermen and -women speak is that this rich and historic accent contains some surprising vowel sounds which can lead, even without a schoolyard joke, to confusion. And it’s perfectly true that the words meat and mate are homophones – i.e. are identically pronounced – on the streets of Belfast. (And that schoolyard, incidentally, over here is pronounced with a twisted ‘oo’ sound that’s close to the French ‘u’ in tu but with an extra little darkening at the beginning: ‘skeuuylyarrd’.) Other vowels are on the move too – ‘ay’, as we’ve seen, tightens to ‘eiy’ (‘peiynt’ is what you apply to walls, if it’s not ‘peiyperr’), the long ‘i’ of vine, height and sign is here flattened to ‘ay’: ‘vane’, ‘hate’ and ‘sane’, while its short variety, found in pin and Sinn Fein is closer to ‘pen’ and ‘Shenn Feiyn’. Famously the ‘ow’ sound in Gordon Brown and Portadown is sharpened to something akin to ‘eye’, thus, ‘Brine’ and ‘Porrtadine’.
Ulster folk often append the word ‘wee’ to items, as in the joke above, ‘yer wee frieynd’, or ‘your wee man’. But ‘man’ in this context would sound more like ‘maan’ with a stretched quality to the short ‘a’ sound. There’s also another quality to these vowels – a sort of tweak in the tail – which gives the speech of urban Northern Ireland a particular zest, and which all those familiar with the pronouncements of Ulster politicians of one stripe or another (it makes no difference to the sound of their accent) will recognise. It means that, for instance, ‘ee’ has an extra little sting: ‘steeil’, ‘feeil’ and ‘reeil’ (for steal, feel and real).
Rhoticity is very evident in Northern Ireland; who can forget the sound of Ian Paisley shouting ‘No surrender’, with all those rasped out ‘r’s. Ulstermen and -women definitely do sound their ‘r’s.
There can also be a breathiness to Ulster ‘t’s, particularly after the ‘s’ sound, such that straight can come out sounding more like ‘sthreiaght’; meanwhile there’s also a tendency to drop the ‘t’ sound from words that begin with ‘th’ – ‘I think therefore I am’ in Northern Ireland might be rendered simply ‘Ay hink dareforr ay aam.’ (Contrast the southern Irish way with these initial ‘th’s which is routinely to harden them up to a simple ‘t’: ‘Oi tink, darefor I am.’
Urban accents in Ulster tend to be sharper, zestier and faster-spoken, the rural sounds gentler and slower. But generalisations are always misleading, and while it’s true that many Ulster folk insert a ‘y’ sound after the hard ‘c’ in words like car and cart and so on, to make a sound again quite similar to that found in the Republic, ‘cyar’ and ‘cyart’, many do not.
But the one thing that’s absolutely recognisable across the Six Counties is the tune of the regional accent, which rises constantly in each sentence, in a version of what’s sometimes referred to as ‘upspeak’, or the ‘high-rising terminal’ tune that’s become very familiar from Australian and Southern Californian speech. It’s the constant interrogative note of this speech pattern that makes it distinctive. And while the international version is likely to have spread from Down Under and the west of the USA, the Ulster variety – as that to be found, curiously, also in Bristolian speech from the west of England – is a naturally occurring local variety that’s been around for centuries and is part and parcel of these local British dialects.
Sadly, and perhaps by association with the ceaseless stream of bad news that poured from Northern Ireland for decades before the completion of the peace process, the sound of the Ulster accent became synonymous with disaster and hatred, from both sides of the sectarian divide. It’s unlikely, therefore, for a while yet that it will rise up the list of favourite British accents. Yet today, BBC Radio 4 has a regular national newsreader who speaks with a marked Ulster accent, alongside all the other varieties on offer from the station – is this a sign of a rehabilitation, perhaps?
You might be broke to the bone (embarrassed) to be seen daundering (wandering) about with a bottle of Buckie (tonic wine, favourite of alcoholics) in the carryout (or bag) you’d got from the off-licence. But you could just tell the wee dump-rat (hooligan) to keep their wee neb (nose) out of your business or you’d call a Peeler (policeman, still current slang), so you would [typical Ulster reinforcing repetition]. And so what if you were quare (very) rubbered (drunk)? It was good craic (fun) anyway, dead-on (fantastic). Craic ninety (very good indeed), in fact.
SIMON ELMES
stream, rivulet (the North and Scotland)
A sike is now found predominantly in the very north of England, in Cumbria, Durham and North Yorkshire (compare to stell), but it has a wider range and until recently was common throughout an extended area including most of Yorkshire, the East Midlands and most of Scotland (but especially the historic Border towns like Selkirk, Melrose and Hawick). This geographical spread says one thing to the historian or historical linguist: Vikings! It corresponds to the Danelaw, the area in which the Vikings held power in England, and within which the Old Norse language exerted a powerful influence on the early development of English. Sike is a Norse word, and like many Norse words in English ending in a hard consonant, it had a counterpart in the South and West ending in a soft one, sitch (dike and ditch give an exact parallel, and rig and ridge show the same phenomenon). Sitch was still recorded in Shropshire and southern Cheshire in the late nineteenth century with the exact same meaning as sike. Historically, both words were typically used to describe streams acting as boundaries between fields.
See WATER WATER EVERYWHERE, and also BECK, BURN, NAILBOURN, PRILL, RINDLE, STELL
to rain heavily (the North)
Like many northern dialect terms, siling comes from the millennium-plus-old Danish invasion of Britain, and probably reflects the Scandinavian term sila, ‘to flow gently, to pour with rain’. As well as meaning ‘to pour with rain’, it is found in English defined variously as ‘to go, pass or move’, ‘to glide’ and also ‘to fall, sink or subside’, ‘to fall down in a swoon’ or ‘to faint away’ and, of tears, ‘to flow’. In food preparation it refers to passing liquids through a strainer (the strainer itself is a sile), ‘to pour’, ‘to drip’ and ‘to allow a liquid to settle and produce sediment’. Quite a multi-purpose list for such a small word.
an ugly girl (UK-wide but particularly Manchester)
Skank, an import from the US – and probably ultimately from Caribbean English – has a variety of meanings, including a smelly girl, an ‘easy’ girl or actual whore, a repulsive person, or a problematic situation. Following the modern bad = good paradigm (as in wicked, bad, etc.), it can also be an affectionate term of address.
See THE MIRROR CRACKED, and also BUTTERS, DUFFY, FUSTY, LAIDLY, MINGER, MUNTER, OBZOCKY, RANK
to hit, to smack (Scotland and northern England)
The word skelping probably evolved because of its sound: it does exactly what it says on the tin. To skelp someone is to ‘have their hide’, in other words, to hit them hard. In East Anglia, you would be kicking them even more violently. The Oxford English Dictionary includes a quote from a York play of 1440 which gives the idea: ‘skelpe hym with scourges and with skathes hym scorne’.
to play truant (Paisley, Scotland and Northern Ireland)
Skidge may be related to a Scottish term skiddle, meaning ‘to move rapidly and lightly’, and English skidding meaning ‘to run’. Whatever its origin, skidging school has a nice, childlike alliteration to it, which might account for its longevity.
Bunking and plunking: playing traunt
The number of words for truancy has risen rapidly since the beginning of the twentieth century. This is scarcely surprising given that mass education only really began with the Elementary Education Act of 1870 and that playing truant in a boarding school is no easy task. The act of playing truant from school is rarely named as such by schoolchildren themselves, rather it’s the voices of authority who use truant, a word that began life in English in the thirteenth century as a word for a vagabond having travelled from France and the word truand, ‘a gangster or mobster’ (the very old Parisian rue de la Grande Truanderie, built in the heart of the medieval underworld district, translates literally as ‘street of the heavy mob’). For those who truant, though, there is a rich lexicon of slang terms from which to choose, and many of them have very local roots. The earliest word for playing truant is mitching, which originally meant ‘to steal’. Later, both nick and to play hookey were also derived from ‘steal’ words. The association was a popular one: steal itself has long had the meaning ‘leave quietly, absent oneself’ when combined with ‘away’ or ‘off’. Indeed, having ‘off’ attached is a characteristic feature of many of these words – bunk off, nick off, skive off, etc. Those verbs that are transitive – in other words those that come with a direct object – are found either with ‘school’ as the object or just ‘it’. So you can wag school, or plunk it, or vice versa. Probably the most general term for playing truant is skiving off, which originated among military personnel during the First World War, and was later picked up by schoolchildren.
See also BUNK OFF, DOG, MITCH, NICK OFF, PLUNK, PLAY HOOKEY, SAG, SKIDGE, SKIVE, TWAG, WAG
drunk (Ireland and moving out through the UK)
‘One night I went out with three other blokes for a drink. Of course we ended up very happy. We were supposed to be back by 1200 hours. Instead, I and two others got back late and stood outside the billet singing “Old Father Thames”. For that I got 14 days CB. I was with Dutchy Holland. We were skimmished!’ Or, as the officer on duty doubtless put it, drunk. It would be his last drink for a while, since this diary entry from a billeted soldier was written in the autumn of 1939. The word skimmished itself comes from Shelta – the Irish tinker’s language – and the word skimis, which means ‘to drink’. The Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of the Shelta language may shed some light on the origin of skimmished; it describes it as ‘a cryptic jargon used by tinkers, composed partly of Irish or Gaelic words, mostly disguised by inversion or by arbitrary alteration of initial consonants’.
See LIQUID LUNCHES, and also BLOOTERED, DRUCKEN, DRUFFEN, FLUTHERED, MALLETED, PISHED, PUGGLED, STOCIOUS
to play truant (UK-wide but especially the South-East)
Skiving or skiving off is a term that has become widespread in British English. Its origins are a little obscure, but it may come from an older dialect meaning of the verb (found in Northampton and Norfolk, for example) which was ‘to move lightly and quickly’. There may also be a link to the French verb esquiver, ‘to dodge’, ‘to slink away’ (a synonym of which in some French dictionaries is filer à l’anglaise, which when translated swaps national accusation to become ‘take French leave’). Skive in the sense of avoiding work or a responsibility was originally British military slang from the First World War. It had certainly arrived in schools by the time of the Second World War, judging from printed sources, but it was probably already spoken slang many years earlier.
See BUNKING AND PLUNKING, and also BUNK OFF, DOG, MITCH, NICK OFF, PLAY HOOKEY, PLUNK, SAG, SKIDGE, TWAG, WAG
a mischievous child (Yorkshire)
This Yorkshire term, meaning ‘a mischievous child’, apparently started life in Sheffield, but has long since moved on. Etymologically it is a poser, with a probable link to skopperil which the English Dialect Dictionary describes variously as a spinning top, a squirrel and ‘a lively, restless person or animal; an active, agile child; a young rascal’. The most likely origin is that of the spinning top (incidentally, another term once aimed at children was spinning like a teetotum, another form of spinning top).
See TEARDOWN TEARAWAYS, and also LISH, UNEASY, WAKEN, WICK, YAP
slovenly (Devon)
Putting together the cast of ‘women of the town’ who provide the background to his Beggar’s Opera (1727), the playwright John Gay simply ‘christened’ a bunch of synonymous slang terms through his characters. Thus among the companions of Macheath (the original Mack the Knife) are such as Diana Trapes, Dolly Trull, Betty Doxy, Nancy Jade, Carrie Shrew, Molly Braze and … Mrs Slammekin. The word was presumably old then, and meant, as it does now, ‘slovenly’, especially as regards dress. Indeed, as Macheath ironically said to Mrs S: ‘Mrs. Slammekin! as careless and genteel as ever! all you fine Ladies, who know your own Beauty, affect an Undress’; in other words, they failed to smarten up.
The original slammakin, though, was not so much a dirty garment, but a long, loose one: presumably its dragging along unswept streets added the filth, and so the dirty garment came to signify its wearer. Nor is Mrs Slammekin merely grubby as to her dress. She is very fond, Gay adds, of a ‘French’ tune: a play on words in which French, as in so much slang, implies a connection with sex.
mud (Ireland, Shropshire and Cheshire)
Like slub, slob is the soft mud often found on the seashore. In this form the word is mostly used in, or in reference to, Ireland, but it also has an extended form, slobber, which is the mud or slime produced by slushy, sleety rain or snow. What you end up with is a sloppy mess or mixture that resonates loudly from the word itself.
See MUD, MUD, GLORIOUS MUD, and also CLART, PLODGE, SLUB, SLUCH
mud (Cornwall and the South-West)
Slub perfectly captures the thick sludgy mud that sticks to your feet and that mixes in with sand and pebbles near the beach. One description of the mud-flats near Devon speaks of ‘the gripes and gullies of the slub ooze’. You can’t say it any better than that.
See MUD, MUD, GLORIOUS MUD, and also CLART, PLODGE, SLOB, SLUCH
mud (UK-wide)
Slutch is still in used in Yorkshire and some parts of northern England. It is a variant of the more onomatopoeic sludge – the mud or ooze that covers the surface of the ground or the bottom of rivers.
See MUD, MUD, GLORIOUS MUD, and also CLART, PLODGE, SLOB, SLUB
The number of local versions of words for raining, and particularly drizzling, comes pretty high on dialect’s scale (see DON’T TALK DRIZZLE,). Of course the inevitable result of so much British rain is that wonderfully sticky sucking substance beloved of all children. Mud is beautifully described in the OED as the ‘soft, moist, glutinous material resulting from the mixing of water with soil, sand, dust, or other earthy matter’. It is a definition deserving of some onomatopoeic descriptors. And dialect certainly provides them.
See CLART, PLODGE, SLOB, SLUB, SLUCH
an unpleasant smell (Cornwall)
We all know about smooching, but would we also like a smeech? On the whole not, since it means ‘an annoying smell’, especially of burning. To smeech is ‘to smoke’, ‘to give out dust’, or ‘to emit a nasty odour’, while smeechy means ‘scenting the air with an unpleasant smell’.
The word comes from Anglo-Saxon smocan meaning ‘to emit smoke’, ‘to reek’ or ‘to send out or give off steam or vapour’. It is, of course, a close relative of today’s word smoke. Finally, smeech can also mean ‘to smoke out’ things such as a wasp’s nest, or ‘to scent’ somewhere, usually a church, with incense.
light rain (Scotland, Northern Ireland)
Smirr is the most widespread of the many Scottish synonyms for drizzle. It is first recorded in 1790, and was in its early days largely confined to southern Scotland. By the beginning of the twentieth century, it had broadened out into general Scottish use, with the variant smirn also found. The etymology is uncertain, but the occasional appearance of the word in East Anglia and Hampshire perhaps gives weight to the suggestion that it is simply imitative of the sound of persistent drizzle.
See DON’T TALK DRIZZLE, and also BANGE, HADDER, MIZZLE
a light snack (Nottinghamshire and in pockets across the UK)
Snap is recorded in most counties of England, but there is a slight predominance in the Midlands and North. In D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, Paul Morel’s father takes bread and butter and some cold tea down the pit in his white calico snap-bag. The term’s origin is the verb ‘to snap’, with the idea of a light meal eaten quickly. It is first recorded in the seventeenth century.
See CLOCKING UP YOUR CROUSTS, and also BAG, BAIT, CLOCKING, JACKBIT, NUMMIT, TOMMY
alleyway (the North-West)
Snicket is equivalent to ginnel both in meaning and in the areas in which it is used. The word seems to have originated in Cumbria and to have travelled south to meet up with ginnel, which was moving north from south Lancashire.
See BY THE WAY, and also ENNOG, ENTRY, GINNEL, JIGGER, LOAN, LOKE, TWITCHEL
to hit on the nose (Lancashire)
To snotter, in standard English, was once ‘to snuffle or snort’. While this sense has died out, dialect’s snotter survives in Lancashire and some other pockets of Britain where it means ‘to deliver a blow to the snot-producer’ (snot, incidentally, goes right back to the fifteenth century and was not always considered vulgar).
to brew tea (the South-West)
Soak appears to be a relative newcomer to the group of words meaning ‘to brew tea’. While the principle variants (brew, mash, mask, scald and wet) are all in place by the mid-nineteenth century, soak is not recorded until the middle of the twentieth. Both transitive (‘I’ve soaked the tea’) and intransitive (‘the tea must soak a bit’) are recorded in Cornwall, Devon, Dorset and Somerset. Curiously, synonyms such as soak, which don’t make an analogy between making tea and brewing beer, are particularly common in the South-West.
See KETTLE’S ON, and also BIRLE, EMPT, HELL, MASH, MASK, SCALD, TEEM, WET
silly (Liverpool)
Apparently first used in this sense by the seventeenth-century scholar Robert Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy, soft meaning ‘silly’ or ‘foolish’ has a dual history – in formal literature (Trollope, Capt. Marryat and Fanny Burney, for example) and as part of informal dialect speech. It is recorded at some point in the local speech of practically all parts of the British Isles, but is now most commonly associated with Liverpool, especially in the phrase soft lad used as a form of address. It can be found in any modern Liverpool novel: for example, ‘Aye soft lad, are you ready?’ (Brass, by Helen Walsh). The Survey of English Dialects in the 1950s found the word particularly in Leicestershire and Norfolk.
Incidentally, in some parts of Britain, soft can mean stupefiedly drunk.
See DON’T BE DAFT, and also ADDLE-HEADED, BARMY, DAFT, FOND, GORMLESS, QUILT
a friend, a mate (the Midlands)
In D. H. Lawrence’s novel Sons and Lovers, set amid the collieries of Nottinghamshire, the hero’s miner father is asked, ‘Shall ter finish, Sorry?’ by his fellow butty. These two terms for companion or mate were extremely popular in the Midlands and Lancashire and their mining communities. Sorry is a version of sirrah, which in turn derives from sir and the Old French sire. Its ultimate origin is the Latin senior, meaning ‘elder’.
See also BLOOD, BREDREN, BUTTY, CATERCOUSIN, CHUCK, CLICK, CREW, GAFFER, HOMIE, MARRA, MUCKER
to hint at, to tell, etc. (in pockets across the UK)
Once upon a time … and indeed ever after, a spell, which took its roots in the Anglo-Saxon verb spellian, meaning ‘to talk or discourse’, was quite simply a story. It is exactly the same spell as the one that lies at the witch’s evil heart of so many fairy tales. For dialect purposes it has slipped somewhat sideways and means ‘to hint at obtaining’, as in ‘I could tell what he was spelling for’. But that is hardly its sole definition: uses in dialect include meaning ‘to tell, inform, narrate or instruct’, or their very opposite, namely ‘to lie’, or at least ‘embellish one’s account’. There are many more meanings besides. Casting a spell might take you anywhere.
money (in pockets across the UK)
Sounding like an escapee from a P. G. Wodehouse novel (and you can find it there), spondulicks (variously spelt as spondulacks, spondulicks, spondooli and spondulix, and abbreviated as sponds) is a good deal older even than Bertie Wooster. It is probably from a Greek word, spondulikos, which was a type of shell used as early money. It may be, though, and as pointed out by a correspondent to Michael Quinion’s website World Wide Words, that the same Greek stem spondylo- is the source of various English words that refer to the spine or vertebrae. Perhaps then a stack of coins looked like the equivalent of the spine, with each coin representing another vertebra. There is some proof for this in an 1867 guide to writing for schools, which lists various regionalisms including ‘Spondulics – coins piled for counting’.
See MONEY TALKS – OR DOES IT? and also ACKERS, GELT, MORGS, REVITS
old-fashioned (UK-wide but particularly the South-East)
Like its antonym cool, square is a term that has a far longer history than you might think. It already had the meaning ‘honest’, ‘truthful’, ‘fair’, at least of a thing or idea, around 1650, and the image of respectability and honesty as far as a person was concerned appeared around 1800. From there it began to mean ‘substantial’, and then, around 1850, ‘safe’ and ‘dependable’ – from a criminal point of view, that is. The next century saw it progress to encompass sobriety and correctness. Finally, at least in the latest chapter of square’s story, in around the 1930s we find the modern use: conventional, conservative, naive and dull. And here it remains, other than on US campuses, where it can also mean ‘straight’ in the sense of heterosexual.
stream, rivulet (Yorkshire and the North-East)
Since its first appearance in the mid-seventeenth century, stell has been associated strongly as meaning a ‘stream’ or ‘brook’, with the North Riding of Yorkshire, Durham, and the North-East as far as the Scottish Borders, although it is also recorded in Cumbria and the West Riding. It is also sometimes used to mean ‘an open ditch in a marsh’.
See WATER WATER EVERYWHERE, and also BECK, BURN, NAILBOURN, PRILL, RINDLE, SIKE
drunk (Ireland)
Like fluthered, stocious originated in Southern Ireland in the early twentieth century, but it has become common in Northern Ireland too, where it can also be used as an adverb. For example, in Billy Roche’s play A Handful of Stars, one character remembers when his father would have ‘come in stocious drunk and gave me poor Ma a couple of belts’. No one quite knows its origin, although a 1949 collection of observations on Ireland talks about the various expressions for escalating degrees of intoxication: ‘You have … spifflu, langers, and stocious. The last word rhymes with atrocious and means thickly speaking drunk … We were unable to find anybody who had ever seen it in print.’ The following years soon put that right.
See LIQUID LUNCHES, and also BLOOTERED, DRUCKEN, DRUFFEN, FLUTHERED, MALLETED, PISHED, PUGGLED, SKIMMISHED
bread roll (north-east England)
A stotty is a bread roll, or sometimes a larger flat round loaf, from the North-East, also called more fully a stotty cake or stotty bun. The word is often now distinctively applied to a bap or cob, sliced and filled with meat or cheese, and distinctively eaten by Geordies, mackems, and other North-Easterners. In this region bread that isn’t a stotty is a fadge, meaning that it is fully risen with a round top.
The stotty’s origins have been lost, but the plump roll might be stout, or you might stutter while attempting to talk with your mouth full of one.
See OUR DAILY BREAD, and also BAP, BARM CAKE, BUTTY, COB, MANSHON, NUBBIES
potatoes (Scotland and northern England)
The Oxford English Dictionary’s first quotation for stovies is from 1893 and a collection of Northumberland words: ‘Hey! lass, is the stavies [sic] no ready yit?’ Stovies, or stoved tatties, are potatoes cooked in a pot (i.e. on the stove as opposed, presumably, to inside it). It is also a term for an Irish stew, for stovy itself means ‘close’ or ‘hot’.
poor, skint (UK-wide)
Bereft of any income, you are strapped for cash. Strapped here applies a literal sense – the result is that you tighten the belt. Hence the imagery, although additionally in the nineteenth century strap could mean ‘credit’, which holds you together. An alternative etymology, dependent on images of emptying rather than of tightening, draws on the dialect use of strap to mean ‘to drain dry’, notably a cow’s udder.
to do the washing up (Cornwall)
The nature of dialect often takes standard English terms and gives them a local twist. Sometimes, however, the words are local to begin with, part of an adjacent technology, whether or not it still exists. This is the case with the rich Cornish phrase for doing the washing up: stream the clome. Clome comes from the Old English term clám, meaning ‘mud’, and by extension ‘potter’s clay’. In household terms this equated with objects made of clay, thus ‘earthenware pots’. As for stream, this comes from sixteenth-century Cornish tin-mining, and referred to washing the surface deposits of tin. From there it was adopted to describe the dipping of clothes into blueing water, and thence moved easily into meaning ‘the washing up’.
giddy (the South-East)
Swimy is a distinctively south-eastern version of swimmy, being widely recorded in Sussex and Kent. As such it represents one of the now very few cases where the South-East has a regional synonym that is not in line with the standard, or at least the dominant, southern word. Swimmy is comparable to the idea of ‘my head is swimming’ and is recorded in the nineteenth century in many parts of the country, but especially in the South, as well as in literary English.
See GOING SWIMMINGLY, below, and also MAZY, REEZIE
When it comes to feeling unsteady and light-headed, there is a distinct North–South divide. Draw a line from the border of Shropshire and Cheshire to about halfway up the Essex coast, say Brightlingsea: north of that line, people are dizzy, south of it giddy. The principal alternatives are mazy in the North-West, and swimy (or swimmy) in the South (which like most of these can have -headed stuck on the end, as can the more sparsely recorded whirly and wonky).
There are a few wonderful local alternatives, such as drumlie in Scotland, fuddled and head-light in Cornwall, whirly in Surrey and wonky in Derbyshire and Yorkshire.