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Local & Dialect Words

I've known 'chuntering' for most of my life, it seems, but I couldn't pin down a definite place of origin. (I've lived in the West Country, East Anglia, Wales and several places in between!)
 
People chunter in Scotland, too.

There's an American tennis player called Mardy Fish, which makes him sound like a disagreeable haddock or something.
 
I find I've used chuntering on this MB several times - the earliest example was in 2007. It's appeared in postings by others too - the earliest of those was in 2004.

From Dictionary.com:

chunter

–verb (used without object) British Informal.
to grumble or grouse mildly or tediously.
 
I use chunter. I have lived all over the country but mainly in the West Country and East Anglia.
 
McAvennie_ said:
...However, my girlfriend uses a lot of these same words that I assumed were specifically a NE Scotland thing and she is born and raised on Wearside. A lot of these are words which I didn't think were generally northern, more specifically NE Scotland...
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Wonder if that's a Viking thing. NE England has a significant Scandinavian element to it's heritage - I know they were really big out west but I'm not up on the Viking influence around Aberdeen and NE Scotland.

An ex of mine was a Fifer and she used quite a few words which sounded Scandinavian - the most obvious and often used being 'braw', pronounced exactly the same way as the Swedish, 'bra', and meaning the same thing (ie good).
 
Stormkhan said:
Another Nottingham term -

Being Mardy = moaning, being miserable.
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A friend of mine from Grimsby uses mardy quite a lot, so that's crossed at least two counties. Although being a Berkshire lad myself, I had never come across it until I knew her.
 
One I'd not heard of, despite my nautical background:

Weird Words: Tagarene
-------------------------------------------------------------------

You're unlikely to know this word - variously spelled - unless you
come from north-east England, especially the Newcastle area. But it
does occasionally pop up in prose that gains a wider audience:

"Now help me tidy up, this place looks like a bloody
tagarene shop." Another one of her expressions. I had no
idea what a "tagarene shop" was, although it clearly
described the disorder and chaos that always threatened
to overwhelm the house if we didn't clear up after my
mischievous younger brother.
[Broken Music: A Memoir, by Sting, 2003. This
appearance isn't so surprising, since Sting was born in a
suburb of Newcastle named Wallsend (called that because
it's at one end of Hadrian's Wall).]

A tagarene shop was a kind of junk shop, sometime specialising in
old clothes but often carrying a much wider range of miscellaneous
oddments, particularly marine scrap. The tagarene man who ran it
did much of his trade with ships:

A "tagareen man" has a floating shop which he rows
about the tiers of ships, announcing his presence by a
bell. His dealings are carried on by barter or cash, as
may be convenient; and old rope, scrap-iron, or other
similar unconsidered trifles, are exchanged for the
crockery or hardware with which the boat is stocked.
[Northumberland Words, by R O Heslop, 1894.]

Such collections of bric-a-brac, oddments and general detritus were
likely to have made a tagarene shop an excessively untidy place and
it's easy to see how the phrase came to refer to a muddle.

Nobody knows its origin. The Oxford English Dictionary tentatively
suggests it's based on "tag". Local people remember "tagger" in the
sense of marine scrap, though the evidence doesn't show whether
it's the origin of "tagarene" or a shortening of it. One suggestion
is that it's Arab in origin. Some Moors in north Africa have that
name; it's been proposed that it was adopted by them after they had
been expelled from Spain in medieval times. (A link to "Tangerine",
a person from Tangiers, which gave its name to the orange exported
from that city, is improbable.) It's unlikely to be true, but the
suggestion isn't as daft as it sounds, because the Newcastle area
has long had an Arab community.

http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/pogw.htm
 
In our family a messy eater was a slobberchops. And a messy tramp a slubberdegullion. (This was many years before Genesis used the latter word in 'Lamb lies down on Broadway').

Being brought up in the south but having many relatives in the North I used to love the dialect differences. Mum, and her Mum and Dad were genuine Cockney, but my Dad was half French Swiss and half Liverpool Italian, and had been brought up by his Welsh stepmum, so you can imagine that in our household there were some serious day-to-day contrasts in the colloqualisms used!
 
Some from areas around Lancs here, although not heard most of them since back in the 80's, and usually they were only spoken by much older generations at that time.

I'm lothered (I'm very hot)
She's giving me chelp (she's being cheeky)
Praters (potatoes)
Parapet (pavement/kerb)
Don't be tight (Don't be so mean)
Jackbit (food)
Klempt (very hungry)
Wiking (crying)
Yed (head)
His house is a middin/midden (His house it very untidy)
Slutch (regular mud)
Quagmire (large area of mud)
Yed Warch (headache)
Gripes (stomach ache)
Stop moidering me (stop bothering me)
Wom (home)
Bog (toilet)
Petty (toilet!)
Butty (sandwich)
Si'thi / sithee (see here, look here)
Shut your cakehole (shut your mouth)
Moggie (small insect)
Maunt (mustn't)

And my absolute favourite - cworp instead of Co-Op (the store). Pronounced long and slow, as in 'cwooaaoorp'. A true curio!
 
escargot said:
That's northern too. I bet you don't know its actual derivation.
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Just had a look about, not finding anything concrete - the first results mention Urdu, Middle Persia, Sanskrit! Doubt these have links to our northern 'mard', but maybe?
Another definition suggested 'potent male':wink2:
Do tell what you know!
 
merricat said:
Stop moidering me (stop bothering me)
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I often heard this from my mother, though it was midering, pronounced mydering. I assumed it was standard English, though I never used it myself, so was never questioned or corrected.

Later, in print, I encountered mithering, which seems to be the most frequently-encountered variant of a flexible dialect word.

I assumed, then, that I had misheard my mother's version, so I am pleased to find some confirmation that the d-sound was also heard with another modified vowel! :pipe:
 
merricat said:
Just had a look about, not finding anything concrete - the first results mention Urdu, Middle Persia, Sanskrit! Doubt these have links to our northern 'mard', but maybe?
Another definition suggested 'potent male':wink2:
Do tell what you know!
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It's derived from 'marred', or 'spoiled', in the sense of an over-indulged child who will cry if they don't get their own way.
A 'marred-arse' is a cry-baby.
 
escargot said:
It's derived from 'marred', or 'spoiled', in the sense of an over-indulged child who will cry if they don't get their own way.
A 'marred-arse' is a cry-baby.
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I thought it was something to do with the 'Mad Mahdi', but thanks for clearing that up.
 
JamesWhitehead said:
I often heard this from my mother, though it was midering, pronounced mydering. I assumed it was standard English, though I never used it myself, so was never questioned or corrected.

Later, in print, I encountered mithering, which seems to be the most frequently-encountered variant of a flexible dialect word.

I assumed, then, that I had misheard my mother's version, so I am pleased to find some confirmation that the d-sound was also heard with another modified vowel! :pipe:
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I think both are valid, though round here its more often 'mithering' than 'moidering'

I love the South Welsh 'by 'ere' which is very flexible but broadly 'in the vicinity'. And the Cornish/Devonian 'my lover' - which doesn't at all mean what it says.

In old books I've seen doolaly spelt deolali, so out of sheer cussedness I like to use the latter.
 
escargot said:
It's derived from 'marred', or 'spoiled', in the sense of an over-indulged child who will cry if they don't get their own way.
A 'marred-arse' is a cry-baby.
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Is a Lard marred-arse a fat cry baby?
 
I've been trying to think of any Scouse words but because of my background (above) they all sound pretty normal to me as does Essex slang. I do have an Essex accent.

Here's a couple I can think of

'Pal'. Can mean anything from 'you're my bestie' to 'I'm about to shove your teeth down your throat'. It's all in the vocalisation.

'La' - or sometimes 'Lad'. Definitely means 'Pal' in the less violent spectrum of its meanings.

'Wind your neck in' - You have overstepped the mark.

And a genuine word not used elsewhere - 'abnabs' = sandwiches. Oh, and 'rantan' - something knocking loudly.
 
Is there a Scottish word 'outwith', as in comes from without?
I'm quite drawn to the sounds of many less familiar words that aren't in my natural vocabulary (whatever a natural vocabulary even means). This always gets me thinking about our voices as extensions of ourselves rather than simply geographical/regional identifiers. I also soak up accents like a sponge, although I tend to speak without one, generally, with a few Northern 'markers' thrown in (bath, not barth, etc).

In my time I have been asked whether I hail from Australia, London and Cornwall to name a few......my favourite being 'posh Scouse', lol, none of which I am very familiar with.
 
catseye said:
'Quagmire' is a fairly normal word. I think it's just that most people don't live near really boggy areas, so don't need to use it. It's in use a lot around here at the moment. Sigh.
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I thought so, although I often heard it used as an expressive term for messy gardens and rain soaked lawns
When I was a child (on a farm), during long periods of wet weather there were vast areas of deep mud - we had to use strategically placed lumps of timber or planks as walkways in an effort to get from one place to another without sinking. It was fun trying to steer a wheelbarrow across a sodden field...one slip and you were sunk :D....then someone dug a cesspit......

Screenshot 2023-01-14 at 19.31.10.png
 
merricat said:
Is there a Scottish word 'outwith', as in comes from without?
I'm quite drawn to the sounds of many less familiar words that aren't in my natural vocabulary (whatever a natural vocabulary even means). This always gets me thinking about our voices as extensions of ourselves rather than simply geographical/regional identifiers. I also soak up accents like a sponge, although I tend to speak without one, generally, with a few Northern 'markers' thrown in (bath, not barth, etc).

In my time I have been asked whether I hail from Australia, London and Cornwall to name a few......my favourite being 'posh Scouse', lol, none of which I am very familiar with.
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There's definitely outwith. It's a fabulous word! Also furth is very useful! And not the same as firth...

Funding came from within and outwith the institution.
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