Tuesday, October 23, 2012

The Co-op vowel shift

We all know the Co-operative. It's a shop and it's a bank, and it's probably many other things as well, but what I am interested in is the way you say it.

In my experience, there are two distinct pronunciations of Co-op in Warrington:
  1. Each syllable pronounced separately: Co - Op
  2. As one word: Cworp
The pronunciation distinction seems to be related to age, so let's have a survey.

If you pronounce Co-op as in number 1, post a comment with the number 1 and your birth year.

If you pronounce Co-op as in number 2, post a comment with the number 2 and your birth year.

As an example, my response is: 1 and 1974

Please ask as many of your friends as you can and post their responses too. Let's try to get some good results for this one.

I'll post the results in a couple of days.

Thanks, Wirelector.

Monday, October 15, 2012

S-words rule! Update

We seem to be having a real influx of words beginning with "S".

Here's a few of the words that have come in from your comments. Keep 'em coming :-)

Update!
I have found a reference to the word "scutch" in the Cheshire Glossary that I posted about back in March.  The full entry can be seen here, half-way down page 178: http://www.archive.org/stream/glossaryofwordsu00leigrich#page/178/mode/2up

Here is a snapshot of the entry:




An anonymous reader had posted the word scutch in reference to skipping. Apparently your legs would get scutched if the skipping rope hit them. Here is the original comment:

"does anyone remember getting their legs 'scutched' when skipping? My dad was an electrician so I skipped with cable and that gave you a good 'scutch' if it caught your legs!" Anonymous.

It appears that the word scutch has changed over time from the cause of the injury to the injury itself. It has also changed from a verb to a noun, a fairly common occurance called conversion.
  • Scutch - a scratch or scrape on the skin
  • Scuff - as above
  • Slutch - sticky, smelly mud (normally along the banks of the Mersey)
  • Slather - drool (normally from a dog)
  • Slavver - a variant of slather
  • Slobber - drool (normally from a baby)
And a few others that have come up:

  • Scrawp - a scratch on the skin
  • Skittering - a thin covering of snow
  • Snig - a worm
It's interesting that we seem to differentiate between the saliva produced by a dog and that produced by a human! Does anyone disagree with this distinction?

Sunday, October 14, 2012

A couple of words

Here are a couple of words that my Dad reminded me of a couple of days ago:

Slothering - to slother, (verb) apparently this refers to the dragging of the feet when walking.

"Stop slotherin' an' pick yer feet up!"

A skittering - (noun) a thin covering of something (almost always used in reference to snow).

"I woke up this mornin' an' there was a skitterin' of snow on the ground."

The verb to skitter also exists. See the following link:

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/skitter

Do you use these words? What do they mean to you?

Monday, October 8, 2012

Building site slang

My beloved older brother has worked his entire life on various building sites around Warrington and the North West. Below is a selection of phrases he said are in common use on those building sites. I don't know if these are specific to Warrington, but I would imagine some of them are.

These are priceless, and some of them hilarious. My favourite is Squirrel up:

  • Half chop - finishing work at dinner time on a Friday
  • Early dart - finishing work early
  • Roman spear - finishing work early
  • March past - not going into work on a Monday
  • Put the stones in - the order to finish work, in other words put a couple of shovel of stones and a couple of buckets of water in the cement mixer, then run it to clean the inside of the barrel.
  • Poke - money
  • Tank - money
  • Boxed off - paying for something
  • Maverick - money put aside for an emergency
  • Squirrel up - staying indoor during the winter
  • Where is your next drop - what's the next job
  • Are you in collar - are you in work?
  • Have you got a bend - did you get work
  • Compo - mortar
  • Bucket of shite - bucket of mortar
  • Cod hod - Hod carrier who supervises other hod carriers

Every field of work has its own slang. What's yours?

Sunday, October 7, 2012

The Wirelect podcast - Update!

The Wirelect interview now available.

The podcast has now moved to Sound Cloud: http://soundcloud.com/radio-warrington/warrington-dialect-with


If you missed the Wirelect interview or you would just like to listen to it again, it is now available to stream or download in its entirety on the Radio Warrington frontpage: http://radiowarrington.co.uk/

Thanks for listening and keep those comments coming!

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Lend and Borrow - The Explanation!

We have had a couple of comments on the mixing up of lend and borrow in the dialect, so I think it is worth taking the time to point out the differences between the two and why.

We will have to use some linguistic jargon to explain the differences, but I will try to keep it simple.

First things first; to lend and to borrow are both verbs, and as such they tell us what is going on in the sentence in terms of who or what is doing what to who.

More specifically they are both transitive verbs, which means that they have to take a grammatical object (normally referred to as simply 'an object'); in this case the thing that is being lent or borrowed.

This means that just "I lend" or "I borrow" sounds weird. And indeed it does sound incomplete!

To make things a little more complicated, transitive verbs can be further subdivided into monotransitive, ditransitive, and even tritransitive verbs, depending on how many objects they take (1, 2 or 3, respectively).

So, to get back to our mixed up verbs, to borrow is a monotransitive verb. This means that it only takes one object. For example:
  • I borrow a book.
The bolded 'book' is the object, and because borrow only takes one object, the sentence looks and sounds fine.

To lend, on the other hand, is a ditransitive verb. This means that it has to take two objects. For example:
  • I lend her a book.
The bolded 'book' is still the object, but because we now have two objects we need to be able to differentiate between them. Therefore, 'book' it is now called the direct object and is still the thing that is being lent. The underlined her is called the indirect object and is the person to whom the book is being lent.

The sentence looks and sounds fine because lend has two objects and is therefore linguistically happy.

The problem arises when we use borrow to mean lend. We subconciously know that the thing we are talking about is lending, and we also subconciously know that the verb lend needs two objects, but we actually say borrow, which only needs one.

It is this inate, subconcious knowledge of the grammar of our own language that allows us to hear when something is not quite right. For example, using the same underline for the indirect object and bold for the direct object notations as before (including an asterix, which is the standard linguistic way of showing that something in ungrammatical), we can see the two objects used with borrow, and thus see why it sounds odd:
  • *I'll borrow you a tenner.
The reverse is also true.

If we use lend with only one object, it also sounds odd:
  • *Will you lend a tenner?
Here the indirect object is missing and therefore leads us to ask the question, "Lend who a tenner?"

So, there we are. A bit long and technical, but I hope it made sense.

Back to reality

Well, after last week's flurry of media exposure, it's time to return to normality.

Thank you to everyone who read the article and listened to the radio interview! It is really great to see that we have some more followers and interested parties.

Speaking of which, we had some very interesting comments (in bold) on the "Your dialect words" page from an anonymous reader. I would like to comment on a few here.

Jiggered - exhausted

I also understand jiggered as meaning exhausted or very tired. However, some quick Google research revealed numerous meanings for the the word jigger. Have a look here.
I am inclined to assume that our use of the word jiggered probably has its roots in the alcoholic measure used for pouring spirits, and therefore quite possibly has a different meaning closer to (very) drunk.

Thrutch - to move along a seat without standing up

I was really pleased to see this word turn up because I have known about it for a long time, but never had cause to use it. Apparently, my grandmother often used the term thrutch in the phrase, "Where there's least room there's most thrutching". My Dad tells me that she would say it when there was a lot of people in a small space. He also says that he believes it is a mining term used by miners who would have to squeeze through tiny gaps in order to reach the coal face. The thrutching was the movement they would have to make to get through the gap.

It's great to know that thrutch is still in use. My grandmother was born in 1903, and must have heard the term when she was growing up. Over one hundred years on and it is still part of our vocabulary, albeit with a different meaning.

I have never heard thrutch used in the sense of moving along a seat without standing up. Personally, I would say shift.
Mention of the word slutch (ie sticky foul smelling mud) made me think about the origins of slutchers lane

I have also wondered about Slutchers Lane. Does anyone know the story behind the name?