Like no i do not

[wellfield]

I do not think I am alone in finding the following way of speaking very annoying. It was by a loud young lady who was on the bus earlier today speaking on mobile phone to her friend." Are you like at the stop now. I'tll be like 15 mins before we like get there, are you like at the Gables, I will like ring the bell 30 seconds after we leave the stop like before"

[anacortesdamp]

I think anyone over 40 years old finds that style of speaking obnoxious. Since I'm pushing 72, I certainly do! We're lucky that we taught our children how to speak with good literacy and they have passed the style on to our grandchildren. They can converse with us old-timers with relatively little confusion. I think it's a fall-out from our English upbringing, though we spoke "lanky" a lot at home.

My maternal grandparents spoke dialect all their lives and we just adapted, speaking dialect back to them. I think there was a lot of Dutch/Flemish/German influence in the dialect back then. The plural of "eye" was "een", the plural of "shoe" was "schoon" and so forth.

Grandad grew roses in the back yard. One day the coal merchant's horse dumped a load of manure while their coal was being unloaded. Grandad looked at the pile and said "That would be grand for my roses" and went for a bucket and shovel.

While he was gone, a Leyland bus chassis on test ran over the pile. When grandad came out with the bucket his comment was "Damn, he's squozzen all t' juice aht!" Until then I hadn't realised that the past tense of "squeeze" was "squozzen". I can't remember any more of his gems - it's a long time ago and we didn't have tape recorders or computers to save all this stuff.

[noel]

I don't know why some people speak so loudly on a mobile phone. A tradesman in ALDI was taliking to I presume a customer on Sunday on his mobile phone and you could hear him all over the store.

[Dave H]

I was brought up in Wallasey on the wirral, but my mother was from an old Leyland family the "Nixons " of westwood road and my father was from a Bolton family the "Harrisons", and I remember old lanky spoken by my Bolton grandfather, sithy lad thoud buzz guin up brew, I was obviously baffled and my mother said, he means " see lad,look At the old bus going up the hill, now it`s obviouse, then I collected a lot of old lanky dialect poems as a young man, sadly now lost.

[anacortesdamp]

A good source of an amalgam of Yorkshire and Lancashire stories is a series of booklets published with Stanley Holloway's monologues. They're not really deep dialect, but they're very funny. I particularly like the one about the Battle of Hastings, which he tells as though it was a football game.

"I'll tell thee of t' battle of 'Astings, as 'appened i' days long gone by. That's when William became t' King of England and 'Arold got shot in th' eye". A later verse goes "Normans 'ad best line o' forwards, well armed wi' both t' buckler an t' sword, but Saxons 'ad best combination, an when 'alf time come, neither 'ad scored". The last verse is " An' after t' battle were o'er, they found 'Arold, reight stately an' grand, sittin' theer wi' 'is eye full of arrer, on 'is 'orse, wi' 'is 'awk in 'is 'and.

He also does one about Magna Carta and another one about "how t' first Yorkshire puddin' were made". The last verse of the Yorkshire Pudding poem goes "It melts in t' mouth like snow in t' sunshine, as light as a maiden's first kiss, as soft as t' down on t' breast of a dove, not elephant leather like this."

Also, I have a booklet, originally published by the LEP, called "Stories by Th' Owd Oracle". They are much stronger dialect than Holloway's stories. I can copy and post them if anyone's interested. The copyright is long-ago expired.


Frank (one o' th' ironmonger Damps)
o'er in Yankee land now.

[garn1943]

Mike Harding does Quite a few monologues including "Napoleon's retreat from Wigan"