Via Damien Hall’s Facebook post I learn of the new Northumbrian Wordhoard, as reported by Tony Henderson for Cultured North East:
A scene: a courtroom in Gosforth in Newcastle some years ago,
The defendant was asked by the solicitor why he struck another man in a bar. The accused replied: “Coz he was slavering on, like.” Everybody in the room knew exactly what he meant, apart the chairman of the bench, an older, upper middle class Northumbrian lady who halted the proceedings to ask: “Excuse me but what on earth does slavering on mean?”
She would have benefited from a new book compiled by the Northumbrian Language Society, which will be launched at an event on Saturday October 14 in Morpeth Town Hall[.] The book, titled Northumbrian Wordhoard, is the most definitive up-to-date dictionary produced by the society in its 40 year history. It contains both 1,250 of the commonest Northumbrian dialect words with their meanings, and also – a blessing for visitors – a reverse list of Standard English items translated into Northumbrian. […]
Among the dictionary’s most common 140 words are Ahint (behind); bustin (to use the loo); bagsie (to choose); duds (clothes); glaikit (clumsy, inattentive}; hacky (dirty); howk (dig up); lowp (jump); lowse (release, as in leaving work or school for the day); palatic (drunk); skelp (beat, slap); stumer (bold plan)[.] And who hasn’t asked at the fish and chip shop for scrumshins (small pieces of fried batter)?
Other words and phrases which decorate the language are browtins up (upbringing); dicky (poorly); clart on (fidget, mess about); gan canny (be careful); hadaway ( go away); skinch (claim for protection or sanctuary); stowed oot (full up); tarry toot ( roofing felt, lino); away wi the mixer (daft); bleb (blister); bleezer (metal sheet with handle to help ignite a coal fire); bowk (belch); cadge (beg, borrow).
The dictionary is the start of a more ambitious project, including the creation of more dialect material for use in schools, adult education and for community groups. The society also welcomes contributions of more words.
I like the reverse-list feature very much. My one complaint is that the story doesn’t explain “slavering on,” and I haven’t been able to elucidate it in an admittedly cursory online search. I did find this entry in Oliver Heslop’s Northumberland words: A glossary of words used in the County of Northumberland and on the Tyneside (London, 1893-94; p. 654):
SLAVERIN, slavering. Applied as a term of contempt equivalent to boobyish, as “slaverin hash,” “slaverin cull,” “slaverin, or slaver-haggish.”
“Henry Hedley is likewise fined for calling Wm. Johnson, one of the Stewards, slavering hash, and deniing to meete 3s. 4d.” — Books of the Bricklayers’ Company, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Nov. 28th, 1665.
”Wor Geordy, one day — the greet slaverin cull —
He wad be a noodle, and act like a full.”Ed. Corvan, d. 1865, He wad be a Noodle.
Allan’s Tyneside Songs, 1891, p. 394.
That’s suggestive, but doesn’t really explain the usage in the article.
Many of these are not “Northumbrian” at all: “duds”, “bagsie”, “dicky”, “bleb”, “cadge” are well-known throughout the UK, for example (though, mysteriously, not familiar to Mr Henderson, it appears. He may need to do some work on his own wordhoard.)
Others are northernisms, but again, not really “Northumbrian” specifically: “glaikit”, “skelp”, “ahint” … all familiar to me, and I’m not Northumbrian in the least. (In fairness, Northumbrian only diverged from Scots significantly fairly recently, and I am familiar with a lot of distinctively Scots vocabulary.)
Duds is very familiar (as old-fashioned slang) in AmE as well (I used to wash mine at Suds the Duds laundromat.) Dud is first attested in the 1300s in the sense of some coarse cloth, hence ultimately also the sense of something faulty.
The DSL gives for slaver
1. intr. To talk nonsense, drivel, to chatter in a silly, empty way, to blether (Cai., Bnff., Slg., Fif., em.Sc.(b), wm., s.Sc. 1970); to talk in an ingratiating or insincerely polite manner (Fif., Edb. 1970), also occas. tr.
https://dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/slaver
Thanks! Seems a minor offense to hit a man for, but I haven’t frequented Northumbrian bars…
Google says slaver means letting saliva run from the mouth.
https://www.google.com/search?q=slavering+def&rlz=1C1ONGR_enUS1024US1024&oq=slavering&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUqBwgFEAAYgAQyCQgAEEUYORiABDIHCAEQABiABDIHCAIQABiABDIHCAMQABiABDIHCAQQABiABDIHCAUQABiABDIHCAYQABiABDIHCAcQABiABDIHCAgQABiABDIHCAkQABiABNIBCjE2MjgxajBqMTWoAgCwAgA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
So is “to slaver” just a variant pronunciation of “to slobber,’ with some extended metaphorical senses that aren’t particularly surprising? Or something else?
They are doublets. Slaver is a ME borrowing from Norse, slobber is an EModE borrowing from Dutch. Neither is cognate with saliva.
(Per Wiktionary, which relies on old sources. I haven’t found anything in Kroonen or Orel’s Germanic dictionaries.)
Who knows. The OED gives ‘Origin uncertain. Apparently related to slabber v. and slubber v., although the relative priority of the three verbs is unclear’ for slobber, and ‘Origin uncertain. Perhaps ultimately < the same Germanic base as the forms cited at slabber v' for slaver, which is slightly older.
It looks like the northern English “slaver” might be pronounced with /eɪ/ (Scots /e/) rather than /æ/ like the standard US and UK pronunciation of the word meaning slobber.
Seems a minor offense to hit a man for
He was evidently infringing treasured local cultural norms, by talking when he should have been drinking steadily instead. Naturally this will have aroused resentment. They probably took him for a Southerner.
(I explain, I do not excuse. I knew a chap from southern England once, and he was quite decent, considering. If a bit gabby.)
I’m always baffled by IPA, but I’ve only ever heard it with the vowel of ‘slave’. In that sense it’s the standard word for me – I had to think quite hard to come up with ‘drool’ as a synonym.
Same for me.
He was evidently infringing treasured local cultural norms, by talking when he should have been drinking steadily instead. Naturally this will have aroused resentment.
I mind me of the Three Monks. “Toingim fom aibit, mani·léicthe ciúnas dom co n-imgéb in fásach uile dúib.”
Re palatic, I suppose this is a shortened “paralytic”.
When anyone starts pushing bleezer as a common, up to date dialect term for a metal sheet with a handle to help ignite a coal fire, I know they’re just slavering on, like. Not that I’d punch them or anything.
The more interesting insult here to me is the noun cull, presumably meaning a useless person, worthy of being culled from the flock? Is that a word people still use in Northumberland, in northern dialects or throughout?
Is “bustin” really a verb meaning to use the loo, rather than an adjective meaning needing to use the loo?
One gets the impression (perhaps unfairly) that the Northumbrian Language Society has not much familiarity with the world of rigorous academic dialect study. Or linguistics in general.
They have a website, but I haven’t delved into it. It may prove me wrong.
I suspect you’re right, but I confess to a fondness for amateur lexicographers as long as they don’t get too wild and woolly.
To the extent Ryan’s critique is based on the notion that the referent of “bleezer” is a long-obsolescent antique technology, he may not be fully reckoning with what a primitive and materially-deprived society the U.K. was (especially but not only after you got past the stockbroker-Tudor London suburbs) well into my lifetime. E.g., they didn’t stop using equine labor (“pit ponies”) in preference to machines in their coal mines until (depending on who you ask) the 1980’s or 1990’s. To be fair, British mine-owners only resorted to pit ponies in the first place after Victorian do-gooder legislation forbade them from using boys younger than 10. I guess the boys were more versatile, being primates and all.
It’s a coal mining part of the country, too – implements and their names may well still exist as part of a local culture even where they’re only in occasional use.
I take David’s point, but I don’t suppose they would claim to. There are plenty of these dialect things about, and they’re generally community projects rather than linguistic projects.
I’d have thought ‘cull’ was just a form of ‘cully’, which is old enough, but I could be wrong.
To be fair, British mine-owners only resorted to pit ponies in the first place after Victorian do-gooder legislation forbade them from using boys younger than 10
Ee. We ‘ad it ‘ard dahn t’pit. But we were ‘appy.
(As the effete Southerners of Yorkshire say.)
It is said that even now, there are parts of Northumbria without broadband.
I don’t suppose they would claim to
Indeed: and I don’t mean to denigrate them at all.
It does seem a bit of a pity not to do it properly if you’re going to do it at all (not that I’m volunteering to help.)
Maybe they do, anyway.
In my capacity as an aficionado of Seventies tv-show performance clips of rock musicians that you can find floating around youtube, I have become devoted to this onetime Northumbrian program: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geordie_Scene. The local teens in the studio audience are generally exhibiting approximately the same naff (I think that’s the cromulent BrEng adjective?) clothing and hairstyles as their counterparts in the Top of the Pops studio audience of the same time period, but you somehow sense that in the event of some sort of physical confrontation involving broken pint glasses as weapons the Northumbrians would handily vanquish the Southrons. Perhaps with some dialect expressions along the way.
Many of the relevant expressions are pandialectal.
In my experience a LOT of work on local, low-prestige varieties is due to local enthusiasts who indeed know little about lexicography and/or dialectology. Considering how marginal lexicography and dialectology have become within academic linguistics, this is sadly unsurprising. Ah well, to misquote a certain American politician, you do local dialectology + lexicography with the people (and associated competence, or lack thereof) you have, not the people you wish you had.
Ironically, though, even the most amateurish lexicography and dialectology is to my mind (I suspect most hatters will agree) a far more valuable contribution to linguistic science than much if not indeed most of what gets published in linguistics nowadays.
Not that the problem (over-theorizing unmoored to anything even dimly connected with a semblance of what could even generously be called linked, however tenuously, to some vague kind of distantly semi-observable reality) is recent, alas.
I recently re-read a fine classic of French linguistics, Henri Frei’s LA GRAMMAIRE DES FAUTES (A very good work examining trends in non-standard spoken French in Europe in the early twentieth century. Reading it was quite a revelation to a francophone linguist-in-training on this side of the Atlantic, because after reading it I realized that Québec French is amazingly UNoriginal as a French variety, our local strong sense of non-French identity notwithstanding. Seriously: I know today of only two features of non-standard Québec French syntax of which no example could be found in that book, and which indeed seem to be our sole original features.)
Well. This time, I was amused: in the introduction (which hitherto I had skipped) he pointed out that he had used many grammar mavens’/purists’ written denunciations of various mistakes in spoken French usage as data sources. He also pointed out that, unlike all too many more “scholarly” works, these purists at least were working with facts. He then apologized for using the facts (which these mavens/purists had presented and written about) in a manner they doubtless would heartily disapprove of. That is to say, in a descriptive rather than a prescriptive fashion. I then reflected that said introduction had been written almost…a century ago.
“Nihil novum sub sole” indeed, as we say in REALLY, and I mean R-E-A-L-L-Y Old French…
Considering how marginal lexicography and dialectology have become within academic linguistics, this is sadly unsurprising
Good point.
I enjoyed a train trip from London to Newcastle last year, in which a group of young Geordies were good-naturedly explaining to an earnest older American what they were saying.
I remember years ago being struck by the fact that the Yorkshire dialect in Nicholas Nickleby is not only pretty good, but is specifically the right Yorkshire dialect: the original of Dotheboys Hall being Bowes Academy, now in Durham, but then in the North Riding. The northern part of Yorkshire is on the same side as Durham (and Newcastle) of some major dialect isoglosses. In other words, they speak Northumbrian.
That Dickens fellow was quite good at it.
The northern part of Yorkshire is on the same side as Durham (and Newcastle) of some major dialect isoglosses.
Indeed. The North York Moors are a wide natural barrier. There’s a coastal multi-day walk running north from Scarborough. Suddenly at Skinningrove we were no longer in Yorkshire, dialectically speaking. That’s a 1960’s attempted new town around a steel works — that seems weirdly out of place on that coast. Long rows of not-quite terraces for the workers brought in from Middlesborough to try to relieve the unemployment there.
In other words, they speak Northumbrian.
Hmm? I’d call Cleveland (Middlesborough) its own thing. Definitely not Yorkshire. OTOH definitely not Durham/Newcastle Geordie.
We went up from the beach looking for a cup of tea and a bun. Landed in the Community Centre, which was running ‘Information Technology’ adult education classes. I was aghast at people typing with a fag between their fingers; the ash gently settling amongst the keys.
I’d call Cleveland (Middlesborough) its own thing. Definitely not Yorkshire. OTOH definitely not Durham/Newcastle Geordie.
And I’d agree. But then, Sunderland dialect is very noticeably different from Newcastle, even (I can understand the latter, but actually had some difficulty with elderly speakers of the former.) There are many mansions in the Northumbrian house.
Am prepared to bet that “palatic” is derived from “paralytic”.
Middlesborough
It’s definit(iv)ely spelled Middlesbrough, but what the local pronunciation may be, this I.Y. saith naught. It may be so named because there was a Benedictine priory there, halfway between Durham and Whitby.
I was aghast at people typing with a fag between their fingers; the ash gently settling amongst the keys.
Such delicacy of sentiment ! One merely turns the keyboard upside down occasionally to give it a whack. Not that different from brushing the crumbs off one’s jabot after consuming a croissant, except that here it is not necessary to do a handstand.
> To the extent Ryan’s critique is based on the notion that the referent of “bleezer”
I did attempt a google first and could only find people struggling to remember a tool their grandmothers had once used, whose purpose they didn’t seem to understand. Indeed, the foggy definition given by the Northumbrian Language Society suggests they don’t quite know either, which is pretty good evidence it’s long out of date.
It takes recognizing that it’s not a dialect word but a dialect pronunciation of the English word blazer to get anywhere. It was a tool for ensuring a strong directional draft (or maybe an islander can help me, is it draught?). And the issue isn’t when coal was phased out but when people stopped being so daft as to burn coal in open fireplaces rather than use stoves designed up front to ensure a proper draft, which was many decades ago.
There ate still people who burn coal. But they don’t need blazers.
Re slavering, the EDD has a long entry for slaver, and the following Yks quotation:
If thoo gies mă onny mare o’ thy slavverment, Ah’ll gĭ tha summat ower lug at ‘ll mak thă remember it.
(for sense 3.(2) Slaverment, sb. fulsome flattery, fawning insincerity, sycophancy; insolence, impertinence)
My impression is that the rough criterion for inclusion is ‘is this word used locally and not (now) in Standard English’, and that’s ok*. A word isn’t not part of (Aberdeenshire) Doric because a form of it is also used in Glasgow, surely?
*If slightly confused in this instance by the fact that if there was a standard official Scots, Northumbrian would presumably be (at least linguistically) a dialect of it, not of London English, and several of the listed words would become standard…
If thoo gies mă onny mare o’ thy slavverment, Ah’ll gĭ tha summat ower lug at ‘ll mak thă remember it.
A very apposite citation!
My impression is that the rough criterion for inclusion is ‘is this word used locally and not (now) in Standard English’, and that’s ok
Exactly. To complain that it’s also used elsewhere is sheer captiousness (something, to be fair, that we are all fond of displaying once in a while).
Lug meaning ‘ear’, per the EDD.
Another one familiar to most if not all UKanians, I’d have thought.
I only knew it as the USanian ‘big stupid guy’, as used, e.g., by tough dames in noir circumstances.
I recall that some time back we were discussing an account of Québécois French which was somewhat analogous: a lot of what was being claimed as distinctively Québécois was actually just normal colloquial French of the kind you’d encounter just as well in Paris.
This seems to be a common misunderstanding: the only point of comparison that people think of using for their local speech is high-register or literary language, so they imagine that all points of divergence from that are specific localisms.
Jen’s point is good, though: Northumbrian would certainly fit better as a “dlalect” of Scots than of “Standard” English.
I had to look up lug.
I’d always thought the Monte Python skit with the mobster who “never nailed my head to a board” was completely off the wall, but I guess it was more like the waggle-me-wig skit, building on old British traditions:
One poor soul was sentenced “To be scurgeit to the gallows and thair his lug takkit to the beame” from the Edinburgh Burgh Records of 1515; in 1576 the Crail Burgh Court required that “Bayth his lowggis to be nalit to the trone”.
Hmm. Nor did I remember that the wig skit was mostly just homophobia till rewatching it just now. I’d held onto a few lines as silly pomposity.
the only point of comparison that people think of using for their local speech is high-register or literary language, so they imagine that all points of divergence from that are specific localisms.
Arnold Zwicky dubbed this the Local Color Illusion, and explained it exactly that way:
Glad to find I’m retracing the footsteps of the giants!
Here’s his post specifically about that:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001633.html
I just like the fact that, whichever meaning of slaver is involved, what is produced is drivel.
*applause*