paamus (interjection)
Lancashire
A beggar’s expression: ‘palm us’ – give us alms. In Furness, they remembered a beggar’s rhyme:
Pity, pity, paamas,
Pray give us aamas;
Yan for Peter,
Two for Paul,
Three for God at meead us all.
pample (verb)
Norfolk, Suffolk
To trample lightly; toddle about – often said of animals or children. From Norfolk: ‘They du goo pamplin’ about i’ the slush’. There was also an adjective: a pampling person was fidgety. The word seems to be a blend of pamper and trample.
parsed (verb)
Herefordshire, Norfolk, Westmorland, Worcestershire
Nothing to do with grammar. This is to be married. It comes from an uncommon use of the noun parson as a verb. From Norfolk: ‘Don’t you wish you was passoned?’ A wedding was parsoning work. From Westmorland: ‘We went te t’chapel for t’parsonin’ wark’.
partick (noun)
Lancashire, Yorkshire
A special friend, a crony. From Lancashire: ‘He’s an owd partick o’ moine’. It’s a shortened form of particular, and the full form was also used in the same sense, especially in the Midlands. From Northamptonshire: ‘They are very old particulars’.
parwhobble (noun or verb)
Cornwall, Devon, Herefordshire, Shropshire
As a noun, a conference; as a verb, to talk continuously, so as to dominate the conversation. Parle and parley were widely used in England and Scotland for any kind of talk, gossip, or conversation. To parleyvoo (from French parlezvous, ‘do you speak’) in some places, such as Cornwall, was to speak in any foreign language or simply to talk with fine big words. Parwhobble sounds like a playful variant.
peedle (noun or verb)
Cumberland, Lancashire, Westmorland, Yorkshire
To look or creep slyly about. Peedling is ‘peering’, as a short-sighted person does. From Westmorland: ‘Any hofe-wit can tell by thy peedlin’ Thoo cannot crack [brag] mitch of thy seet [sight].’ Peedoddle, ‘dawdle’, seems to be related. A Lincolnshire source talks of a man who ‘stands peedoddling aboot, isted i’ geetin on wi’ ther work, and rammen [rushing] right strite inte it’. This is pee in the sense of peer – ‘look closely and narrowly’ or ‘look with one eye’ – perhaps from pie (the magpie), reflecting the way birds look around.
perjink (adjective)
Scotland
Exact, precise; particular; trim, neat. From Forfar: ‘He was looking unusually perjink’. A person displaying these qualities would be ‘a perjink’. Perjinkities were ‘niceties, exact details’. But at the other end of the country, in Cornwall, perjinkety meant ‘apt to take offence’. The jink element is probably imitative, with a sound expressive of smallness or nimble motion, as with dink and jump.
perqueer or perqueerly (adverb)
Scotland
Accurately, by heart. From Aberdeenshire: ‘Ye maun gee your answer just perqueer’. The word could also be used as an adjective. From Banffshire: ‘Him speak sae faire, him sae perqueer’. It’s a French loanword, harking back to the period in the Middle Ages when the Scots and the French were especially close: par coeur, ‘by heart’.
pettigues (noun)
Sussex
Troubles, worries. ‘She’s not one as would tell her pettigues to everyone’. The model would have been fatigue. The pet element is known as a separate noun (as in colloquial standard English, to be in a pet, ‘a fit of peevishness, a childish sulk’). Dialects display a wider range of idioms, such as at pet, in the pet, and take the pet. From Yorkshire: ‘He taks pet at ivvery thing yan [one] sez or diz [does]’.
picklick (verb)
Huntingdonshire
To pick over one’s food in a fastidious, fault-finding manner. ‘Now then, don’t sit there mammocking [cutting into pieces] them air vittals over. If yer can’t do arout [without] picklicking, you’ll ’a’ter [have to] do arout grub altogether’. The word is a combination of lick and pick in its sense of ‘choosy’ (as in modern picky).
pious-high (adverb)
Dorset
Sanctimoniously. ‘Granty be a churchwarden, and do come to church so reg’lar, and holds up his nose pious-high’. Pious is from Latin, and originally meant simply ‘devoutly religious’, but in the seventeenth century it took on a negative meaning of ‘hypocritically virtuous’.
pleep (verb)
Scotland
To speak in a querulous, complaining tone of voice. The word was originally used to describe the chirping of a bird. From the Shetland Isles: ‘a pleepin’ an’ a cheepin’’. People would talk about the plaintive chirping of sea-fowl: ‘da pleeps alang da shore’.
pload (verb)
Cumberland, Northamptonshire, Northumberland, Scotland, Yorkshire
To wade through mire and water. From Northumberland: ‘Fither’ll hammer ye for ploading i’ the broad witter’. It is an adaptation of plod, influenced by load. A ploader was a plodder, a hard worker.
plook or plouk (noun)
Cumberland, Northumberland, Scotland, Yorkshire
A pimple; a spot on the skin. A Scottish writer talks of someone ‘whase face was fam’d through a’ the shire for wrats [warts] and plouks’. The word is a borrowing from Scots Gaelic, and travelled south into England, generating a small family of related words. If you were covered with pimples, you were plooky, plookit, or in a state of plookiness.
pluffy (adjective)
Cornwall, Devon, Leicestershire, Scotland, Warwickshire, Yorkshire
Fat, swollen, chubby; soft, porous, spongy. From Leicestershire: ‘The monks at the Tin-meadows say they live on nothing but vegetables; how come they be so pluffy, then?’ The word is from pluff, widely used in the British Isles in its sense of ‘puff, blast, as of a slight explosion’, but also influenced by plump and puffy. In its ‘spongy’ sense, it was usually applied to food, such as bread or vegetables.
polrumptious (adjective)
Cornwall, Kent, Lincolnshire
Restive, rude, obstreperous, uproarious. From Cornwall: ‘I’ll get the loan o’ the Dearloves’ blunderbust in case they gets polrumptious’. The word seems to be an inventive combination of poll (‘head’) and rumpus. The origin of rumpus is unclear; there may be a link to the dynamic action verbs romp and ramp.
ponommerins (noun)
Cheshire
Light, fleecy clouds dappling the sky. ‘I thought it wur goin’ to rain, didna yo see those ponommerins this morning?’ It’s a pronunciation of ‘pan-hammerings’ – the cloud pattern was thought to look like the kinds of marking seen on a new pan.
poweration (noun)
Cheshire, Herefordshire, Shropshire, Staffordshire
A great quantity. From Cheshire: ‘It cosses a poweration o’ money’. From Shropshire: ‘A poweration o’ rain’. Power has a similar meaning in such expressions as ‘a power of good’ and ‘live to a powerful age’.
preedy (adverb)
Cornwall
Easily, creditably. ‘That lock goes mighty preedy’. ‘She does it bra’ [fine] and preedy’. The source is pree, a widely used verb which meant ‘experience, attain’, itself a shortening of prieve, which in turn was a variant of prove. A preeing was a testing. From Perthshire, a variant of a well-known proverb: ‘The pruif o’ the puddin’s the preein’ o’t.’
prickmedainty (adjective)
Cumberland, Scotland
Finical in language and behaviour; conceited. From Ayrshire: ‘Bailie Pirlet was naturally a gabby prick-me-dainty body’. Prickmaleerie was used in a similar way. The first element is prick in the related sense of ‘adorn’, as in Northumberland: ‘She’s a’ preeked up wi’ ribbons an’ laces’.
prinkling (adjective)
Northumberland, Scotland
A pricking, tingling sensation. An obvious blend, the word suggests that people wanted something to express a feeling that combined the two sensations. It was used in a variety of circumstances. From Selkirkshire: ‘a prinkling through a’ my veins and skin like needles and preens [pins]’. From Ayrshire: ‘a prinkling at the roots of his hair’. You could have a ‘prinkling conscience’, and, when in love, one cheek would ‘prinkle’ when touching another.
proggle (verb)
Durham, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Northumberland, Warwickshire, Westmorland
To goad, prick, poke about. The verbs prod and poke gave rise to many other variations, such as prockle and proitle. Further north, and into Scotland and Ireland, it was usually proddle. From Leicestershire, of someone searching for an eel: ‘The’ was progglin’ about i’ the mud fur’t best paart o’ haf a hour’.
pross (noun)
Durham, Lincolnshire, Yorkshire
A chat, gossip. The word was widely used, especially across the North Country. From Lincolnshire: ‘Come and smoke a pipe, and we’ll have a little pross’. To hold pross would be to have a familiar talk with someone. If you were a conversational type of person, you were prossy. The origin is an adaptation of prose.
puckeration (noun)
Lancashire
State of excitement, vexation. ‘It’s no use gettin into oather a tantrum or a puckerashun abeawt an accident o’ this sort’. In Yorkshire it was puckerment; and pucker, in the same sense, travelled the world, including America and Australia. The source is puck, a name made famous through the fairy of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but much more widely used in the sense of a mischievous or evil spirit. Its value as an expression of annoyance is well illustrated by its intensifying use, which of course has its echoes in other expressions today. From Derbyshire: ‘Why the puck don’t you let her out?’
purt see apurt
pussivanting (noun)
Cornwall, Devon
An ineffective bustle. From Cornwall: ‘This ’ere pussivantin’ may be relievin’ to the mind, but I’m darned ef et can be good for shoe-leather’. The source is thought to go back to the fifteenth century, when King Edward IV sent messengers to stop certain sea-captains levying excessive taxes. The messengers, called pursuivants (‘pursuers’), weren’t very successful, hence the later dialect meaning, with its folk pronunciation. There were variants elsewhere, such as Wiltshire, where it turns up meaning ‘a flurry’ as pussyvan or puzzivent.
puzzomful (adjective)
Devon, Lancashire, Yorkshire
Poisonous, noxious; filthy, infectious; piercing, very cold; spiteful, mischievous – in short, a very negative word. The origin is a local pronunciation of poison. From Yorkshire: a dose of unpleasant medicine is called ‘puzzumful stuff’; the weather has ‘puzzomful winds’; someone is described as having ‘a puzzumful tongue’.