In Michael Wharton’s novel Sheldrake, the hero, Major Sheldrake, finds himself in the northern town of Borewich where he is given unsought information about the local speech. ‘Food for thought! That’s an old Borewich expression the Major won’t have heard of,’ he is told. ‘Ah, Major, come and have some tea. The cup that cheers — that’s another old Borewich saying you’ll not have heard, I dare say. Come and meet my wife. A right Borewich lass. Garn thrixen. Better a troust ner a thoutch, eh?’
I was reminded of this inability to distinguish local peculiarity from the generally commonplace by the BBC wireless series Word 4 Word, which this summer reported on a survey of spoken English that the BBC undertook in association with the University of Leeds.
I’m all in favour of language surveys and finding out how widely people in Sussex still call a walkway between houses a twitten, or in the Midlands a twitchel.
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