DIALECT AND WORD MEANINGS

[Stanley]

Right place Rosie. Hippings is an old name for stepping stones across a beck and possibly Hippings was the person who owned the land at the time and put them in.

[chinatyke]

Re: MYSTERY OBJECTS
Author: Stanley » 18 Feb 2013, 14:35
Went for a furtle on the web but couldn't find anything that helped. It would be nice to know how they did it. Try this one....

Furtle? That's got to be a local word hasn't it? I have heard it long ago, as in "he was furtling around" = furtively looking for something. It's strange the words we come out with, without realising they are not in common usage.

[Stanley]

Rosie, my reply shou;ld have said that Pickles was probably the owner! Sorry.
China, I first came across 'furtle' in Cheshire and have used it ever since. Seems I may have introduced the word to many people but I like the sound of it.

[rossylass]

Hmmm. I wonder.

[Stanley]

Words are fascinating.... If you lived in the US you would be comfortable with the description 'truck-farmer' for a person who grew food on a commercial scale for the locality, the equivalent hare would be 'market-gardener' I suppose. But think about the phrase "I will not have any truck with him". The word 'truck' is nothing to do with a wheeled vehicle, it is an archaic word for barter or trade. Middle English 'trukken' which perhaps has a Germanic root. There's an Old French word 'troqqen' as well.

[Tripps]

The German word 'trockenbeerenauslese' comes immediately to mind, lovely wine. I thought there might be a connection, but it seems not. Apparently it means 'dried berry selection' .

[Stanley]

German word construction is so peculiar. Fahr rad (go wheel) for bicycle.....

[Bruff]

Off to Newcastle today to stay with friends for the weekend, taking in a trip to Edinburgh tomorrow (wife's never been).

Like the Geordie accent and dialect. 'Em gannan hyem' for 'I'm off home'. If I said that to my Swiss mother-in-law she'd know exactly what I mean, as it's more or less the same as her Canton's Swiss-German dialect. I've mentioned this before on here, but my dad when he checked his tickets and found he'd won nothing again on the lottery would go 'Noot' (essentially 'nowt' of course). And this is exactly what they exclaim in the Canton when they find the same - 'Noot'.

I'll no doubt hear the Geordie term of endearment, 'pet'. Prefer it to the 'hon' (short for 'Honey' you get here in Merseyside). And the 'duck' they use in the East Midlands, Leicester in particular. As for the first time a male clippy on the bus in Sheffield called me 'flower', well......

Richard Broughton

[rossylass]

My friend studied Rabbie Burns' Tam o' Shanter for her GCE (many moons ago) and her Danish brother in law recognised many dialect words.....not as surprising as the Swiss connection. Finnish is similar to Hungarian. We do get about us humans.

[Tripps]

The Finns , who are a very intelligent people tell the story of their ancestors who long ago were trekking westwards across Central Europe, when they came across a road sign which read "Turn right for Finland - straight on for Hungary"

The ones who could read turned right.

[Stanley]

It always makes me smile (a bit watery I'll admit) when extreme right wingers are speaking and don't realise that the very language they use is proof of the fact that there is no such thing as a 'pure bred Englishman'.

[Tripps]

Did you think McDonalds invented going large?........Looks like Rudyard got there before them.


"Yes, makin' mock o' uniforms that guard you while you sleep
Is cheaper than them uniforms, an' they're starvation cheap;
An' hustlin' drunken soldiers when they're goin' large a bit
Is five times better business than paradin' in full kit.
Then it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, 'ow's yer soul?"
But it's "Thin red line of 'eroes" when the drums begin to roll,
The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll,
O it's "Thin red line of 'eroes" when the drums begin to roll."

[Stanley]

Good man Kipling on the quiet. He wrote much about the real things of life. His mistake was to go Jingoistic in WW1 and pull strings to get his son into the army even though his eyesight was shockingly bad. Later he wrote. " If they ask you why we died, tell them that our fathers lied". He never got over it and changed his views on war.

[Tripps]

Wow - that got me a thanks from Superjack. I'll have little smile on all day!

I have the "Complete Verse" never far away. The 'Mary Gloster' and The Last Suttee are two of my regular reads. He'll do me. Carol Ann who?

[Stanley]

Never underestimate a jack! Young Tom is a lot deeper than he tries to show us. As for Kipling, he is one of my favourite authors and I particularly like it when he's telling stories about technical matters. Have you read 'The Day's Work'?

[Bodger]

Not sure if this should be here or genealogy ? but links to christian names and variations
http://www.namenerds.com/uucn/advice/nickhistory.html

http://www.babycenter.com/0_unusual-bab ... 0375911.bc
I guess in future some of these names will make it easier for researchers !!

[Tizer]

German word construction is so peculiar. Fahr rad (go wheel) for bicycle.....

But it makes learning much easier for children...an young British child won't understand haemorrhage (let alone spell it) but a German child knows immediately what blutfluss means (blood + flow).

Finnish is similar to Hungarian. We do get about us humans.

I think I 've mentioned before on OG that Sweden has many old churches with architecture more like a mosque to our eyes than a Christian church. But we tend to forget how much people, goods and ideas flowed north-south across Europe as well as east-west and there was a lot of contact between Scandinavia and the Middle East in days gone by, much of it by river traffic.

[Stanley]

There's a book by Barry Cunliffe 'The wonderful voyage of Pytheas the Greek' which is an eye opener if you thought we were isolated 2,500 years ago.

[Stanley]

Words can be tricky things.... One of the things that has cropped up in my present reading on translation from the Hebrew for the King James Bible of 1611 is that the origin of the feminine forename Beulah is a Hebrew word be'ulah which means a woman who has been 'mastered'. In other words, controlled. Not the origin in most of the forename dictionaries!

[rossylass]

My bloke lives in Beulah Terrace & the only person I ever knew to have that name lived opposite, but I don't think she was ever mastered! Is Hepzibah biblical ? There is place on Chat Moss called Hepzibah Farm. Some farms have lovely evocative names....my dad used to take me to see his pal at Asphodel Farm.

[Whyperion]

Given the number of times Beulah appears in the Bible ( Once - so far as my internet searches throw up ), it occurs somewhat more times in Hymns and Spiritual Songs , and I cannot find a reason for the name Beulah Hill in South London ( Upper Norwood , and slightly famous for the site of a TV transmitter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croydon_Transmitter ) .

http://bible.cc/isaiah/62-4.htm Gives the Verse ( we could have a longish discussion of the rather odd way the bible was chopped up into chapters and verses as it seems to have been done with no regard either to English , Underlying Greek/ Aramaic / Hebrew or other spoken or written languages of the parlance it was recorded in )

" No longer will they call you Deserted, or name your land Desolate.
But you will be called Hephzibah, and your land Beulah;
for the LORD will take delight in you, and your land will be married."
( New International Version (©1984) )

I remember Melvyn Bragg on the literature of the KJV (AV) bible that much of the English was deliberately retained in a style that was already going out of general fashion and speaking in order to give a kind of gravitas , authority and adding to the 'ancient feel' of the text.


" Thou shalt no more be termed Forsaken; neither shall thy land any more be termed Desolate:
but thou shalt be called Hephzibah, and thy land Beulah:
for the LORD delighteth in thee, and thy land shall be married."
(King James Bible (Cambridge Ed.) ) . Much nicer language.

The concept of Marriage ( where the property of one person becomes that of another , along with the ownership(control) of the person ) I think should be read in the Jewish (Biblical and later Jewish Scholars view ), where 'control' is more about the Responsiblity of the 'owning' partner. I think this is where , in English , we have many problems with Words as Control or Domination , they are taken as Power Over - often giving rise to a justification of abuse or exploitation , which I understand is not present in the original intentions, which are ones of a required protection and responsibility for well-being.

I have also taken a small liberty in the formating to show what I think to be reading the verse ( and taking a word or a verse out of the context as a whole is always dangerous ), is one of poetry. Here we have both Peoples and Land ( and some would say they are one and the same ) , and the first line I guess is a deliberate contrast to the last - a poetic turn and contrasting the idea of [ (God) Forsaken / The LORD Delights and Abandoned / Cultivated ] . I suppose this is much the same area as we get the often used phrase ' A God-Forsaken Land/Place'

I think one other problem with Hebrew text is that things like consonants generally don't exist in the written form - I think punctuation is also missing , but am happy to be corrected on these impressions , and that some inbuilt 'titles' of bits of the original script forms have been incorporated into the body of the writing. Effectively parts of the Old Testament are text-speak with headers and footers - long before mobiles and microsoft word , yet strangely the tablets are back in the C21st.


2 Kings 21:1 Manasseh was twelve years old when he began to reign (King of Israel in Jerusalem )..., and his Mother was called Hephzibah .

OXFORD DICTIONARY
asphodel, n.
1 any plant of the genus Asphodelus, of the lily family.
2 poet. an immortal flower growing in Elysium.

[Bruff]

I was reading my Prospect magazine last night, and there was a nice little article in there on cliches. 'Cliche' is, as you expect, French and stems from the printer's trick of grouping together common words/phrases and so on to save a little time. The origin of a few cliches were noted. Apparently, 'cut to the chase' is from a 1930s Hollywood movie (can't recall the name), where a direction was to literally, cut to the chase.

The distinction was made between a verbal tic and a cliche. 'At the end of the day' is a verbal tic, in that its removal does not change the meaning of the sentence. As opposed to phrase which if removed would do so no matter how irritating a cliche it may be.

Richard Broughton

[Stanley]

I like a definition I once heard of cliché, "An oft-repeated truth"

[Bruff]

Yes, rather like the definition of nagging: 'the repetition of an unpalatable truth'.

Richard Broughton

[Stanley]

That's a first for me Richard but there is a lot of truth in it! Luckily, Jack doesn't nag......