Already a subscriber? Log in
I’m all in favour of language surveys and finding out how widely people in Sussex still call a walkway between houses a twitten, or in the Midlands a twitchel. But there still remains the comical unawareness of the banal and undistinguished.
Simon Elmes in his book about the series, Talking for Britain (Penguin, £14.99), mentions the result of asking youngsters from Lancashire for expressions used of someone who is ugly. ‘The preferred words were the inevitable normal standard minger and minging, skanking and anging, and, very derogatively of women by men, dogs. It’s vernacular, certainly, but not what you’d call regional English.’
Naturally, a clear awareness of terms goes more with clique-slang than with regional dialect. The chavs and pikeys tend to be the people a couple of miles down the road, in Blackburn, say: ‘We call them townies — they wear trackies and Rockies [Rockport shoes] an a bit of bling-bling.’
Even when the BBC interviewed some traveller women in Northern Ireland, they tended to bring out their set-piece preserved fragments of cant or jargon (one aspect of the speech known as Gammon that they had inherited) as professed ways of keeping secrets from prying strangers or police. They said that ‘plant the inox’ meant ‘hide the thingummy’ — a phrase which the police would surely soon twig. But when they spoke spontaneously of their own experiences, it was more accent than vocabulary that made their language different, as with this snatch on the characteristics of traveller folk: ‘Uf the’ wuh dreisst en tahp qualatei clawz, the minute they open theh meouth papale audomadically awpens their eiyes weiderr as much as t’saiey — well iss na what shiz wearin’ bot iss the waiey shiz taak’n — so you still arre edentifyed.’
Also in Society
Latest
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in