Rustic Speech and Folk-Lore. Elizabeth Mary Wright
popularly known as Old Three Laps, who died in the year 1856. When a young man of thirty he became engaged to be married. The wedding-day was fixed, but when the appointed hour came, only the bridegroom appeared in church. At the last moment the bride’s father, dissatisfied about the marriage settlements, refused to allow his daughter to marry the man of her choice. The disappointed bridegroom returned to his home, went to bed, and vowed he would stay there, and never speak again to any one. He kept his word up to the time of his death, forty-nine years later, when he is said to have exclaimed shortly before his end, ‘Poor Bill! poor Bill! poor Bill Sharp!’ A Yorkshireman has a very strong sense of his own dignity, and some ‘South-country’ people mistake his attitude of independence for impertinence, and because he will not brook a condescending manner or a dictatorial speech, and because he says exactly what he means, they style him rude. Many stories are told of a certain grocer in Settle noted for his treatment of impertinent customers. A lady one day walked into his shop and inquired very abruptly: ‘What are eggs to-day?’ ‘Eggs,’ was the prompt reply. At Kettlewell once a man and his wife, evidently on a cycling tour from ‘down South’, came into the inn, and demanded tea in such peremptory tones, that the landlady turned her back on them, and we heard them muttering: ‘She’s bound to give us something.’ If you want to be well served at a Yorkshire inn, the first thing to do is to take note of the name over the door before you cross the threshold; then you can address the landlady as ‘Mrs. Atkinson’ (pronounced Atkisson), for you will need her name constantly, if you wish your conversation to be agreeable to her. ‘Down South’ we are very chary in our use of proper names in conversation; we can talk to an acquaintance or a friend by the hour addressing him only as ‘you’. In the North, we should intersperse our remarks freely with ‘Mr. Brown’ if he is an acquaintance, or ‘John’ if he is a friend. It is a noticeable fact that in the North men call each other by their Christian names, where in the South they would use the surname without the formal Mr. But to return to inns. Having duly passed the time of day with the landlady, you will next have to converse with her serving-maid, whose name has yet to be discovered. We have adopted a plan of addressing her always as ‘Mary’, till she gives us better information. The last damsel we thus met told us her name was Dinah, and further, that she was ‘a Lancashire lass’. In Yorkshire if you ask a person his or her name you must say: ‘What do they call you?’ You might not be understood if you said: ‘What is your name?’ The first question in the Catechism has often met with no response other than a vacant stare from children in Sunday Schools. A story is told of a clergyman near Whitby who went one day into the village school, and seeing a new face among the boys, said: ‘Well, my lad, and who are you?’ Boy: ‘Aw, ah’s middlin’; hoo’s yoursen?’
Tea in the Parlour
The Kettlewell landlady was so charmed by our greeting, and our use of her name and her dialect, that on our very first visit she treated us to her old family silver tea-spoons, and on the next occasion we not only had the tea-spoons, but we had a real old Queen Anne silver teapot as well, and a perfect feast of cakes, laid out in the private parlour where the foot of the tripper never trod. We came upon an inn full of trippers once, and though we were shown to a seat at a table, we could get no further attention, for nobody seemed to have time to fetch us any lunch. At last we secured the ear of the daughter of the house, and we pleaded our cause in her native tongue, whereupon she quickly fetched her parents, and the table was laid, and spread with ample fare in the twinkling of an eye.
In a seventeenth-century Tract—Of Recreations—in which are put forth the delights of ‘riding with a good horse and a good companion, in the spring or summer season, into the country’, the author goes on to tell us: ‘And if you happen, as often it falleth out, to converse with countrymen of the place; you shall find them, for the most part, understanding enough to give you satisfaction: and sometimes country maids and market wenches will give as unhappy answers as they be asked knavish and uncivil questions. Others there be, who, out of their rustical simplicity, will afford you matter of mirth, if you stay to talk with them.’
CHAPTER II
RICH AND EXPRESSIVE VOCABULARY
It is generally supposed that the vocabulary of dialect-speaking people is very small; indeed, it has been stated as a scientific fact that the common rustic uses scarcely more than 300 words. The most cursory glance at the English Dialect Dictionary, however, will suffice to convince anybody that this statement is incorrect. The six volumes of this Dictionary contain in all over 5,000 pages, and the number of simple and compound words in the first volume (A-C) is 17,519; and from the careful statistics given of the contents of this volume, it may safely be inferred that the whole Dictionary contains over 100,000 words.
As may be expected, we find in this vocabulary an immense variety of terms or phrases for expressing one and the same idea. For instance, there are approximately 1,350 words meaning to give a person a thrashing, and an almost innumerable quantity meaning to die, and to get drunk. There are some 1,300 ways of telling a person he is a fool. A few names taken at random are: chuffin head, coof, gapus, gauvison, goostrumnoodle, Jerry pattick, mee-maw, ning-nang, nornigig, rockey-codlin, Sammy-suck-egg, snool, stooky, Tom-coddy, yawney, yonnack. A fine cumulative effect is produced by a few introductory adjectives, with or without a final pronoun, in such personal remarks as: Thoo goffeny goavey, it’s thoo at’s daft Watty; You drumble-drone, dunder-headed slinpole; Thah gert, gawmless, sackless, headed fooil thah. There are about 1,050 terms for a slattern, such as: daffock, dawps, drazzle-drozzle, flammakin, hagmahush, lirrox, mad Moll o’ the woods, mawkin, moggy, rubbacrock, slammock or slommocks, trail-tengs, trash-mire, wally-draigle.
Names for the Smallest Pig
Among animals possessing a large variety of names the smallest pig of a litter holds a very prominent place with over 120 titles to distinction, such as: Anthony-pig, cadme, Daniel, dilling (a very old word for darling, occurring in Cotgrave’s Dictionary and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy), greck, little Josey, Nicholas, nisgal, pedman, ritling, runt, squab, treseltrype, wrenock. That handsome bird the hickwall, or green woodpecker, Gecinus viridis, figures under almost every letter of the alphabet; whilst the sparrow and the stickleback also rank high on the list. Among flowers, the ox-eye daisy and the foxglove have the largest number of different names. The foxglove is called: fairy fingers, fairy glove, fairy petticoats, fairy thimbles, witches’ thimbles, bloody man’s fingers, dead man’s bells, flop-a-dock, poppy-dock, pop-guns, &c., &c. One would fain find in Thormantle, or Thor’s-mantle, a trace of ancient mythology, but the most probable explanation of the term is that it is a corruption of tormentil from Potentilla Tormentilla, a flower which shares with the foxglove the name Thor’s-mantle.
Names for a Brook
It would be an interesting experiment to try and trace out geographically the use of the various words denoting a stream of water: beck, burn, dike, sike, strype, water, &c., &c. The New English Dictionary tells us that beck is ‘the ordinary name in those parts of England from Lincolnshire to Cumberland which were occupied by the Danes and Norwegians’. Another authority, Mr. Oliver Heslop, says: ‘This term, which is found in Danish and Norwegian settlements in England, occurs about sixty-three times in the county of Durham. In Northumberland it is represented in the solitary case of the River Wansbeck, and in this it is questionable whether the second syllable is originally beck,’ and further: ‘The line dividing the more northern burn from the s.Dur. and Yks. beck is a sharp one. It runs along the ridge between Wear and Tees from Burnhope Seat eastwards to Paw Law Pike. The tributaries to the Wear, on the n. side of this ridge, are burns, and the similar affluents to the Tees, on its s. side, are becks.’ In Kettlethorpe church, in Lincolnshire, is an epitaph on a former Rector of the parish, the Rev. John Becke, who died in 1597:
I am a Becke, or river as you know,
And wat’red here yᵉ Church, yᵉ schole, yᵉ pore,
While God did make my springes here for to flow;
But now my fountain stopt, it runs no more.