Rustic Speech and Folk-Lore. Elizabeth Mary Wright
already in Middle English, as, for instance, in Hampole’s Psalter, c. 1330: ‘Do til thaim as till iabin in the bek of cyson,’ Ps. lxxxii. 8. Burn is an English word, O.E. burna, burne, a brook, and is found in Sc. Irel. Nhb. Dur. Cum. Yks. Stf. Sike is also a native word, O.E. sīc, a watercourse, which comes down further south to Lei. and Nhp. Strype is a purely Scotch name. Jamieson thus defines it: ‘A strype is distinguished from a burn. The gradation seems to be: watter, a river; burn, a brook; burnie, a small brook; strype, a rill of the smallest kind.’ Though a water means a river in Scotland, in England it more usually denotes a smaller stream. The term is found in Dur. Yks. and Lan., and is common in Som. and Dev. An amusing incident once occurred at a Village Penny Reading entertainment where one of the songs on the programme was the well-known ballad poem, On the Banks of Allan Water. The pathetic notes of the last lines:
On the banks of Allan Water
There a corse lay she.
had hardly died away when the audience burst into a roar of laughter. They had understood the climax to be some kind of practical joke played by the miller’s daughter: ‘There o’ corse [of course] lay she!’
Names for a Girl
Attempts have been made to show the geographical distribution of the words for girl, or young woman. Ellis states it roughly thus: ‘mauther in Norfolk, maid in the South, wench in no bad sense in the Midlands, and lass generally in the North, girl,’ he adds, ‘is rather an educated word.’ The word mawther occurs in the Promptorium Parvulorum (circa 1440), the compiler of which was a Norfolk man. Sir Thomas Browne (1605–82) mentions it as one of the words ‘of common use in Norfolk, or peculiar to the East Angle countries’. It occurs in Ben Jonson’s Alchymist, 1610; and Tusser, who was an Essex man, uses it two or three times in his Fiue Hundred Pointes of Good Husbandrie, 1580:
No sooner a sowing, but out by and by,
with mother or boy that Alarum can cry:
And let them be armed with sling or with bowe,
to skare away piggen, the rooke and the crowe.
The word is used in Glo. Hrt. and Wil. besides East Anglia. At a trial once in Norfolk the Judge inquired who could give evidence of what had just been stated; the reply was: A mawther playing on a planchard [a girl playing on the floor]. The Judge, not being a native, was completely mystified. Maid is the equivalent used in Dor. Som. Dev. Cor. When a new baby arrives, the question as to its sex is always put thus: Is it a boy or a maid? A similar use is found in the Bible, cp. ‘If she bear a maid child,’ Leviticus xii. 5. In the sense of young woman, or girl, the word maid occurs frequently in the Authorized Version of the Bible, whereas the word girl only occurs twice; e.g. ‘The maid [Esther] was fair and beautiful,’ Esther ii. 7; ‘Can a maid forget her ornaments?’ Jeremiah ii. 32. The daughter of Jairus, aged twelve, is in St. Matthew ix. 24 ‘the maid’, though in St. Mark she is ‘the damsel’. Wyclif termed her ‘the wenche’, a term which occurs in the Authorized Version in 2 Samuel xvii. 17, ‘And a wench went and told them.’ In Yorkshire and Lancashire wench is a term of endearment; in Cheshire it is simply the feminine of lad; in Oxfordshire they summon cows with the cry: Come, wench, come, wench; in Gloucestershire the well-known rhyme runs:
A wickering [giggling] wench and a crowing hen,
Is neither good to God nor men.
It is to Gloucestershire also that belongs the story of the local preacher who declaimed with terrific fervour: There you go, you chaps and wenches, head over heels to hell, like zhip [sheep] drow a glat [a gap in a hedge]. The North-country lass may be of any age, though commonly she is a young girl. The word is often used as a term of address, e.g.
Owd lass, says I, tha’rt heigh i’ boan
An’ rayther low i’ beef.
Natterin’ Nan.
The East Anglian Bor
One of the most comprehensive terms of familiar address is the East Anglian bor, applied to persons of either sex and of all ages, e.g. Hullo, bor! where be you a’goin? The plural is together, e.g. Well, together, how are ye all? Bor is an old native word, O.E. būr, which we have in the literary language as the second element in neighbour. How convenient it would be if we could adopt bor into the upper circles of the spoken language, for use at those awkward moments when, after a lapse of years, we unexpectedly find ourselves face to face with an old acquaintance, whose name has slipped from our memories. How openly cordial we could be, and at the same time so comfortably ambiguous: And is it really you, bor? How glad I am to see you again! But if we were to attempt to lay a plundering hand on the dialects with intent to enrich our standard speech by handy and convenient dialect words, we should be embarrassed by the wealth before us. What literary word, for instance, conveys the full meaning of the common dialect term feckless (Sc. Nhb. Dur. Cum. Wm. Yks. Lan. War.), the lineal descendant of Shakespeare’s effectless? It means: incapable, incompetent, without resource, shiftless, helpless, and a great deal more besides, all in a handy nutshell. There are scores of adjectives, the forceful individuality of which we instinctively feel, and yet find very hard to convey in the terms of a verbal definition. We are driven to string together inadequate synonyms, or pile up pedantic phrases. A feckless body we define as: a person incapable of any effective effort; waughy (n.Cy.), we say, is used in illness, nearly always during convalescence, to express the feebleness, shakiness, and light-headedness after confinement to bed. It also means weak in body, especially when accompanied by a tendency to faint, e.g. I felt that waffy, I should hev siled doon upo’ th’floor, if missis hedn’t gen me sum brandy. Chuff (n.Cy. n.Midl. Midl.) is proud, pleased, denoting a combination of fussiness and serene self-satisfaction. We certainly have here much meaning in little room, as Dr. Johnson found in the word shrew, which he defines as: ‘A peevish, malignant, clamorous, spiteful, vexatious, turbulent woman.’
A gradely Lass
A few words such as canny, dour, pawky, have gained a recognized position in the standard speech, through having been introduced by educated Scotchmen. Some of the meanings of canny are expressed in the adjective gradely, a word generally quoted as characteristic of the Lancashire dialect, in the phrase a gradely lass. It belongs, however, also to Cum. Wm. Yks. Chs. Stf. Der. Shr. In origin it is a form of graithly, a Scandinavian word, O.N. greiðligr, ready, prompt, and it can mean: (1) respectable, honest, (2) handsome, comely, (3) friendly, kind, (4) clever, (5) having full possession of one’s senses, (6) genuine, good, (7) considerable, big. A similarly compact word in general dialect use throughout Scotland and England is jannock, or jonnock; like gradely, also of Scandinavian origin, cp. Norw. dial. jamn, even, level, of which jannock is apparently a derivative form. The commonest meaning is fair, honest, straight-forward: Yü may trist she. I tellee ’er’s jonnick tü tha back-bone (Dev.). Another attractive adjective in general dialect use is peart, a delightful word, which positively sounds: brisk, lively, spirited, cheerful, in good health, sharp, and intelligent. It has nothing to do with pert either in form or meaning. It is used specially of persons just recovered from an illness, e.g. Pretty peart again now—but it may also be used of animals and plants. We may remark: Them onions look peart, in contemplating the onion-bed. A common proverbial saying in Cheshire is: Poor and peart like the parson’s pig, whereby hangs a tale. The proverb is traced back to the days when the parson had to take some at least of his tithe in kind, when the pig reserved for him was wont to be a small and thin one, and consequently specially brisk and active compared with the pigs that went to market. More obvious similes are: as peart as a lop [flea]; as peart as a pyet [magpie]; as peart as a cock-robin; and with a figurative touch: as peart as a spoon. Closely connected with the literary uncouth, is the widespread dialect adjective unkid. It looks at first sight like the poor relation from the country, clad in rough rustic garb, but as a matter of fact it is historically a perfectly correct form, cp. M.E. unkid, not made known, -kid = O.E. cȳðed, p.p. of cȳðan, to make known. Indeed our