w
TIRED (SCOTLAND)
Wabbit means ‘tired out’, or ‘off colour’, and is very much associated with Scottish English. Given its expressiveness, it is frustrating that its origin is unknown. The Scottish National Dictionary suggests that wabbit may be related to the word woubit, ‘a hairy caterpillar’, and a word sometimes contemptuously applied to a person. In this sense wabbit may have arisen from the slowness of a caterpillar’s movement, suggesting heaviness and exhaustion.
John Buchan used a version of wabbit in his 1922 novel Huntingtower, in the account of how some of the little boys, the Gorbals Diehards, foil a Russian anarchist and his gang: ‘When he had run round about them till they were wappit, he out with his catty [catapult] and got one of them on the lug.’
See ALL PAGGERED AND POOTLED, and also BLETHERED, BUSHWHA, DIRT DEEN, JIGGERED, LAMPERED, MAGGLED
a Liverpudlian (Liverpool)
If fab and gear were two of the terms that the Fab Four brought with them from 1960s Liverpool and placed swiftly within the national vocabulary, then wack, used in general (and often as a term of address) of a friend and specifically of a fellow Scouser, was not far behind. The word is a local abbreviation of wacker, meaning active – thus a ‘wacker little fellow’ – which in turn goes back to the standard English word wakeful.
to play truant (London and Lancashire)
To wag or to hop the wag dates back to the mid-nineteenth century. It is included in the journalist and chronicler Henry Mayhew’s 1861 study London Labour & the London Poor, where he also mentions playing the wag, an idiom which the Oxford English Dictionary sees as being linked to wag meaning ‘a mischievous person’, and thus ‘playing the fool’.
Wagging can also be found in Dombey & Son by Charles Dickens, and early evidence suggests it was Londoners who started the practice. By the twentieth century, however, the word was common in the North, and it remains particularly used in Lancashire. As for its origin, the term may go back to a mid-nineteenth-century Cockney pronunciation of vag, a term for a vagrant.
See BUNKING AND PLUNKING, and also BUNK OFF, DOG, MITCH, NICK OFF, PLAY HOOKEY, PLUNK, SAG, SKIDGE, SKIVE, TWAG
(of a child) lively (North Midlands)
Waken is probably an extended use of waken meaning ‘awake’, although the forms recorded, such wakken and wacken, strongly suggest that the influence of wick can be seen. One collector of Cheshire dialect at the end of the nineteenth century commented that the term ‘rather implies that the lad has a spice of harmless mischief in him’.
See TEARDOWN TEARAWAYS, and also LISH, SKODADIDDLE, UNEASY, WICK, YAP
baby, child (Scotland and northern England)
Wean is a contraction of wee ane (‘little one’) into a single noun, with the earliest unambiguous example of it as a single word being in 1728. It is recorded everywhere where wee is a standard or at least well-known alternative to little. So it can be found throughout Scotland, in Northern Ireland and also in the northern part of England, but its epicentre is the south of Scotland. All the writers associated with southern Scotland, from Burns and Scott through Robert Louis Stevenson to James Kelman and Irvine Welsh, use the word as the standard term for a small child. The analogous littl’un, or littlan, is also found in much the same areas.
See SMALL TALK, and also BABBY, BAIRN, CHIEL
Compared to our grandparents, babies and children have attracted only a handful of colloquial names. Maybe those who care for them are too busy to have time for neologism. There are, however, a number of slang terms that have arisen from specific contexts. Sprog, for example, originates in military slang, for it originally meant ‘new recruit, trainee’. Kid is likely to have been in Old Scandinavian the word for a baby goat, as in the standard English today, brought to England by the Vikings. It was first used to refer to a human child in the London slang of the late seventeenth century. But on the whole, enduring local synonyms are hard to find, and are in the main restricted to Scotland and the north of England. Most have simple etymologies, being a variant pronunciation of a standard word (e.g. babby, chiel) or a self-explanatory term like wean. Bairn is by far the most noteworthy alternative, having been standard in Scotland and the far north of England for 600 years or more. But in pockets of Britain you can still hear nipper, babe and ankle-biter (borrowed from the US). Iona and Peter Opie’s collection of the Lore and Language of Schoolchildren from the 1950s includes the wonderful observation that ‘a chap who has got duck’s disease is most often labelled “Tich” in a friendly manner, or “squirt” or “little squirt” in a less friendly manner. Alternatively: ankle biter, dolly mixture.’
a lot of cash (London and UK-wide)
Relaunched into general use in the 1980s, wedge has been around as a piece of criminal slang for many centuries. Based on the actual lump or wedge of silver from which coins and plate are beaten out, it began by meaning silver coins in general, then added silver plate, which itself was melted back into wedges by criminal receivers, who were for a while known as wedges themselves. The modern use, doubtless reflecting inflation, conjures up a thick, chunky roll of banknotes, usually folded in half (and resembling a wedge); thus a large amount of money or wealth in general.
to brew tea (the South-West)
Like many words now recorded in the South-West, wet formerly had a wider currency across the whole of the south of England. Indeed, at the end of the nineteenth century, a specific meaning for wetting the tea was found in Kent, defined as ‘to pour a little boiling water on the tea; this is allowed to stand for a time before the teapot is filled up’. This wider southern use tallies with the word’s use in, for example, H. G. Wells’s novel Kipps, which is set, again, in Kent.
See KETTLE’S ON, and also BIRLE, EMPT, HELL, MASH, MASK, SCALD, SOAK, TEEM
a trifling matter; a passing fad (Northamptonshire)
Some words just sound right, and w(h)im-w(h)am, meaning a ‘trifle’, ‘nothing’ or ‘momentary fad’, is surely among them; its peers, all synonyms, include flim-flam, jim-jam and trim-tram, and they too are applied to trivial or frivolous things. Whim-wham is further defined as ‘a fanciful or fantastic object or idea’; ‘an odd fancy’, ‘a child’s toy’, ‘a snack or food’ and ‘a waterwheel’, ‘a weathercock’ and ‘a rattle to frighten away birds’. In other words, it is a multi-purpose word.
Whim-wham’s origins remain mysterious, but there may be a connection to the old Norse word hvima, meaning ‘to wander with the eyes as with the fugitive look of a frightened or silly person’, and hvimsa, meaning ‘to be taken aback or discomfited’. Thus it may be another of those words brought over by Britain’s Scandinavian conquerors. Whatever the answer, whim-wham offers itself to a number of phrases: all on the whim-wham means ‘shaking’ or ‘quivering’ (used of something that has been insecurely fastened); to be as contrary as a whim-wham is to be very cross. A whim-wham for a goose’s bridle, meanwhile, is something that April Fools are sent to look for, while making a whim-wham to wind the sun up is a way of side-stepping some child’s query of ‘What are you doing?’ In the same vein, to be making a whim-wham for a threshing-machine, or a whim-wham for waterwheels, is to idle away one’s time by doing nothing at all. The over-eager child can also be fobbed off by making a whim-wham for a mustard-mill or a treacle-mill.
an ostentatious idiot (Liverpool)
The verb whop means ‘to thrash’ or ‘to defeat’, and probably comes from its echoic sense of one object coming into abrupt contact with another. Taken figuratively it created the noun whopper, defined variously as ‘a notably large object or person’, ‘a particularly unashamed lie’, ‘a painful fall’ and in the plural, ‘well-developed female breasts’. The figurative use is extended in Liverpool where the ‘notably large’ imagery has brought whopper to mean an ‘ostentatious (and thus large) idiot’.
alive, living (northern England); an active child (the North)
‘You get on my wick’ means, of course, ‘you irritate me’, and is a piece of (coarse) rhyming slang, even if the meaning does suggest that what is really suffering is our sense of self. There are no such buts about the northern use of ’wick (with an apostrophe), which is an abbreviation of the standard quick, as in ‘living or endowed with life’. Quick is linked to a wide range of European languages, whether Dutch, German (and all its older versions), Icelandic, Swedish and so on. Further back still one finds the Latin vivus, ‘living’, and ultimately the Sanskrit, the root-source of all Indo-European languages, jîva. So it is that in a 1970s edition of Lancashire Life we hear of ‘Granny Martha Mosscrop, approaching her century and as wick as a flea’.
Wick is also, and importantly, the nearest thing to a predominant northern term for an active child, being recorded in Lancashire, Cumbria, Durham, and most parts of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. Quick itself is recorded in this sense in Staffordshire.
See TEARDOWN TEARAWAYS, and also LISH, SKOPADIDDLE, UNEASY, WAKEN, YAP
ill; cold and hungry (Cornwall)
To seem wisht as a winnard (or simply to look like a winnard) is a Cornish phrase meaning ‘to appear either very ill, or very cold and hungry’. It might seem, for those not intimately aware of bird-life (and probably for them as well), a strange combination. Wisht is a wide-ranging and rather spooky negative, meaning variously unlucky, uncanny, eerie, awe-inspiring, horrible, mad, wild, sickly, haggard or white-faced. Wishtness is either witchcraft or, if personified, a ghost; the wisht-hounds, straight out of the nightmare cupboard, are spectral hounds, presumably of hell; wishtful means ‘melancholy’ and wishtfulness ‘sadness’ (not, surprisingly, related to wistfulness). Not much fun so far. To get our phrase we add the winnard, otherwise known as the redwing, Turdus ilacus. Quite why the hapless redwing, a relation of the thrush and blackbird, should be seen as a harbinger of sorrow or sickness is unknown: the probable reason is that the bird only appears in winter, a time of doom and gloom. A variant, meaning just the same, but a bit less sinister, is mazed as a curlew, a phrase that may in its turn refer to the bird’s cry.
an outsider (Liverpool)
In Australia a woolly is a sheep, and in Liverpool, where woollyback means ‘an outsider or non-local’, (with the accent on a country-dweller and all the stereotypes that such a life implies) the sheep is still central to the image. Unflattering it may well be, but it is at least a kinder term than the synonymous sheepshagger, another Liverpool term for the hapless peasant, and well-known as the title of Niall Griffiths’s novel of 2001. A similar term in Yorkshire for a non-local is offcomeduns, a variation of the term offcomer.