Another little snippet - Rugby dialect

Local team sports are great for hearing the dialect. It can be any sport, but in the case of Warrington it is rugby. We are at our most tribal when we follow, support and watch our local team play. It is the perfect opportunity to throw ourselves fully into our culture, our history, our dialect. We actively want to belong to our team and our town, and we will go to great lengths to display that belonging. We have our tribal colours (primrose and blue), we have our tribal songs, we have our tribal territory (the old Wilderspool ground and now the Halliwell-Jones stadium). It is a time when we can overlook our differences and come together as a coherent unit united against our common enemies.

This all sounds a bit dramatic, but all you have to do is go to a local game and watch and listen as we psychologically gather behind our team. For a couple of hours we openly hate the opposing team and its supporters. These supporters may well be at other times our friends, workmates, possibly even neighbours, but for the duration of the match they are enemies. You are either in or you are out; us and them!

A clear example of the dialect at work is in the common name of the team – The Wire. Since the inception of the Super League in 1996, the Warrington team has been known as the Warrington Wolves. This naming policy has far more to do with corporate branding than with the town itself, and this is reflected in the name given to the team by the supporters and inhabitants of the town – The Wire. I do not know anyone who actually refers to the team as the Wolves, and tellingly the team is referred to as "The Wire" in some places on the Warrington Wolves website.

Wire working had been established in the town in the late 18^th century and the factories of William Houghton and Nathaniel Greening provided employment for local workers. As bigger and more productive factories grew in the town, names such as John Rylands, Thomas Locker and Frederick Monks became household names in Warrington, and by the start of the 20^th century they were the main employers in the town. Wire-drawing was not the only metal-working industry in Warrington, but it was the most important, and hence the beloved local rugby team acquired the name – The Wire.

This is a perfect example of a dialect word that develops specifically in a particular location and acquires specific meaning and prestige. Wire was so important to Warrington that it came to define the town. Equally, the successful local rugby team that travelled the country and even further afield became an ambassador for the town, and as an ambassador it had to represent what the town represented – wire.

“The Wire” means something to native Warringtonians, which is lost on anyone else. This is the essence of dialect.

The many names of death

I do not intend this post to be sombre, but a couple of words for dying popped into my head and I wondered how common they are.

There are many ways of describing the act of dying in the English language, for example:
to croak, to kick the bucket, to pop your clogs, to shuffle off the mortal coil, to go domino, etc.These all seem to be common throughout the country, and indeed the wider world. But how common are the following:

• To cark it
• To kiff it

As in, "He carked it" or "He kiffed it".

A quick search for references to cark revealed a long history but with different meanings. Wiktionary has cark as related to Middle English carken and Old English carcian, meaning to be anxious about something or to care for:

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cark

Whereas the Free Dictionary has it as related to Norman French carquier meaning to burden:

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/carked

Kiff or kiffed, on the other hand, has many different meanings from joining a gang and really liking something to feeling a bit strange, and many others (Google it).

These two verbs were both in use by my peers, and one of my frineds used kiffed when I was in Warrington in November.

Any other words for death? What do cark and kiff mean to you?

A little taster of the book

Here is a little snippet of one of the introductory pages of the book. There will be more in the coming weeks and months. Let me know what you think.

I remember when I was a kid, no-one ever talked about a dialect. Come to mention it, no-one ever talked about language much. If someone brought up the subject of language, it was usually about some other language, some foreign language - usually French – and how it sounds “bloody lovely”. Or maybe German and how that sounds “bloody awful”. The English language never came up much in conversation; it seemed to be reserved for school. But the English we learned in school was a strange animal, it didn’t feel like the English that I knew and it certainly didn’t sound like the English that I spoke.

We were told not to split infinitives, or leave dangling prepositions. We were warned about “bad grammar” and told to pronounce properly. I didn’t know what any of that meant, except the pronunciation bit, and as far as I could tell I pronounced the words in exactly the same way as everyone I knew, so didn’t that count as pronouncing properly?

I distinctly remember one lesson when we had been forewarned that it would be about bad language. The excitement was palpable. The entire class was itching to hear the teachers explain to us about swearing. We thought that they might swear during their explanations; we even thought that we might get to swear, purely, of course, as an integral part of an active discussion. We couldn’t wait for that lesson to start. I remember that, for once, everyone was sitting nicely, facing the front, paying attention.

Miss Gardiner, “with an I; GAR-DI-NER”, she always told us in over-exaggerated syllables, turned to face the class.

“What is bad language?”, she said dramatically.

“Fuck off”, someone replied from the back before she could make the rhetoric apparent.

“Out”, she said pointing to the corridor with her bony finger, and we all suddenly realised that it wasn’t going to be the lesson we had hoped for. That was the way it was taught in those days, and I’m not talking about the 1950s here, this happened in the mid-80s!

The British education system just didn’t know how to get creative with regard to its mother tongue. Instead of embracing the diversity of regional variety, exploring the history of the development of the language, and using the way we actually spoke as a means to highlight our linguistic heritage, we were told that we couldn’t speak properly, and more damagingly, the inference was that we would never learn.

The scary thing is that my school was a perfectly ordinary comprehensive in an upper working class area of Warrington. It was hardly Eton College or some other public school hell-bent on brow beating every last drop of the regional out of my speech. My school was “dead ordinary” as we put it, and the staff seemed ordinary too, but there was an insidious slant to the English curriculum that had infected all schools.

Hard boiled or soft?

How do you like your eggs? Hard boiled or soft?

Nowadays I like a hard-boiled egg, but when I was a kid my mum would make me soft-boiled eggs with soldiers (everyone knows what they are, right?)

The point of this post is not the name of the strips of toast, although any comments on those are most welcome, rather the eggs themselves. The soft-boiled type for dipping were called "Chucky eggs". I am assuming that this is the correct spelling as I don't remember writing it down before. Nevertheless, chucky eggs were soft-boiled eggs, just right for dipping soldiers into.

I have found one reliable reference from Michael Quinion, who gives a different definition:

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-cho2.htm

Did you call them chucky eggs? Or something else?

Wirelect - the book!

As I posted on the Wirelect Facebook page earlier today, I have now started writing the book based on this blog and the Warrington dialect itself.

From time to time I will post snippets of the text on here as a taster.

Now is the time to tell your friends and post your comments, dialect words, sayings, anything related to the Warrington dialect - it will most probably end up in the book!

Also, as you will have noticed, we now have a new picture for the blog. I took the picture on my visit to Warrington in November 2011, the afternoon of Guy Fawke's Night, to be precise. I want to keep the bridge over the Mersey as the central theme of the blog because the crossing point over the river has been so central to the development of the town over the past two millenia, and quite possibly for much longer.

In keeping with this theme, are there any dialect words for the river itself?