B

backsyfore (adjective or adverb)

Cornwall, Devon, Shropshire

The wrong side first. From Devonshire: ‘Thee hast a’ put on thy hat backsivore’. But the word goes well beyond the modern sense of ‘back-to-front’. It could also mean ‘the contrary way’, as in this example from Cornwall: ‘Wemmen be oogly things ef you rub ’em backsyfore’. And the meaning of ‘clumsy’ is dominant in ‘A cruel backsyvore job he’th a-made o’t’, from Devon. It must have been a popular expression, for it gave birth to backsyforemost and the rhyming backsyforsy. A backsyforsy side of something would be a rear view.

baggerment (noun)

Lincolnshire

Rubbish. The word applied both to worthless talk – ‘He talked a lot of baggerment’ – and worthless things – ‘Your land is full of baggerment’. A variant form was bagment, which led to the adjective bagmentally, meaning ‘worthless’ – ‘He’s a bagmentally chap’. The origin seems to be baggage, which developed the sense of ‘rubbish’ during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, echoed today in such expressions as emotional baggage and intellectual baggage – ‘undesirable beliefs or experiences carried around in one’s head’.

baltiorum (noun)

Yorkshire

Boisterous merry-making which often accompanies a bonfire – and thus, any kind of riotous proceedings. It’s a playful mock-Latin coinage, with the ending seen in such other colloquialisms as cockalorum (‘a self-important little man’) and jiggalorum (‘a trifle’). The bal- part is a puzzle, though. It might be an echo of hullabaloo. Baloo was recorded on its own, meaning ‘uproar’, in places as far apart as Devon and Northamptonshire.

bamfoozle (verb)

Cornwall, Somerset, Yorkshire

Deceive, confuse, especially by trickery. Bamboozle is the more widely used word, and bamfoozle is obviously an adaptation – perhaps showing the influence of confuse. It probably arose at the same time, in the early seventeenth century. In an essay for the Tatler magazine in 1710, Jonathan Swift lists bamboozle as one of the new slang coinages ‘struggling for the vogue’ in London. Country folk hearing the strange word would easily have misheard or mispronounced it.

bange (noun or verb)

Essex, Hertfordshire, Norfolk, Suffolk

Fine rain, drizzle. The word rhymes with range. And to describe what’s happening to the weather? Bangy. ‘Tis a bangy morning’, they used to say in that part of the world, and perhaps some still do.

bangster (noun)

Scotland

A bully, a violent fellow – one of several words that come from bang, in its sense of ‘strike’. If you were bangsome or bangie you were really quarrelsome. Like it or not, bangsters often won the day – hence its other meaning of ‘victor’. Walter Scott uses the word in this sense in Chapter 19 of The Abbot: a fight breaks out after someone insults the Pope in an alehouse, and is beaten for his pains, leading an onlooker to say: ‘If the Pope’s champions are to be bangsters in our very change-houses, we shall soon have the old shavelings back again’ – the monks will be back!

barkle (verb)

Derbyshire, Lancashire, Lincolnshire, Northumberland, Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire

Cake, encrust (with dirt) – said especially of hair, skin, and clothes. From Lincolnshire: ‘I was that barkled wi’ muck when I com oot of Cleugh Heäd, I thoht I should niver get mysen cleän no moore’. The notion is of someone being covered with dirt as bark covers a tree. D. H. Lawrence liked to use it: in Chapter 12 of Sons and Lovers we find Paul and Clara climbing down a steep path of red clay: ‘Their barkled shoes hung heavy on their steps’.

bathy (adjective)

Gloucestershire, Kent, Shropshire, Worcestershire

Damp, moist – said especially of food, grass, and domestic linen. The word reflects the pronunciation of bathe not bath. Grass-cutting was especially affected, as a Gloucestershire writer records: ‘The grass is that bathy, as it bawds the scythe’ – fouls it up.

batterfanged (adjective)

Lincolnshire, Yorkshire

Bruised, beaten, scratched – as if ‘battered by fangs’. From Lincolnshire: ‘Hed been a so’dger i’ th’ Roosian war, an’ come hoäme reg’lar batterfanged’. To get ‘a good batterfanging’ was to receive a severe clawing, whether from an animal or a human, as a Yorkshire writer sedately records: ‘The consequences, in the shape of combined blows and scratches, which await the champion who engages a female combatant in battle’.

bazzock (verb)

Yorkshire

Beat, thrash. The spelling varies greatly, including bazzack and bassock. In a Yorkshire story, we read: ‘He bazzacked her whahl she was stiff as a stowp’ – until she was stiff as a post. And in another place a man gets ‘a good bazzicking’. Several words could be related to the first part, such as bash and baste. The -ock ending has a wide range of meanings in English, usually to do with things being small (hillock, bollock) or clumpy (hummock, tussock), but here it seems to have an intensifying force, as with mammock – ‘tear to pieces’.

beflum (verb)

Scotland, Yorkshire

Deceive by using cajoling language. In Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor (Chapter 25), Caleb escapes from just such a situation: ‘An [if] I had been the Lord High Commissioner to the Estates o’ Parliament, they couldna hae beflumm’d me mair’. This is be- in the sense of ‘affecting someone or something’, as when one is befriended, but here with a nuance of ‘thoroughly’. The flum part is probably a shortened form of flummox, widely used in dialects before it became part of standard colloquial English.

begrumpled (adjective)

Cornwall, Devon, Somerset

Displeased, affronted. There’s something about gr- that suggests a gloomy state of mind: think of grumble, grumpy, growl, grim, and other such words. Grump, as a verb meaning ‘complain constantly’, was used all over England. From Worcestershire: ‘er sits and grumps’. If you took the grump you would have lost your temper. In Scotland a surly person was said to be grumply. Begrumpled fits into this family well, with the be- prefix adding a note of ‘very much’.

begunk (verb)

Cumberland, Ireland, Scotland

Cheat, deceive, jilt. And begunked: cheated, disappointed. There may be a link with geck, from Dutch, meaning ‘fool’, but the sound effect of the -unk ending (as in clunk and kerplunk) gives the word a no-nonsense finality that’s lacking in its standard English counterparts. Which is the more definite: ‘I’ve been jilted’ or ‘I’m clean begunk’?

bemoil (verb)

Lincolnshire, Staffordshire, Worcestershire

Covered in mud – from a French verb meaning ‘drench’ or ‘soak’. The word was probably known in Warwickshire too, judging by the way Shakespeare used it in Act 4 Scene 1 of The Taming of the Shrew. Grumio describes how Katherina fell off her horse in a really muddy place – ‘how she was bemoiled’.

bencher (noun)

Worcestershire

An idler at a public house. ‘Thee be’st a riglar bencher, thee’st weared thy breeches out a sittin’ o’ the public-’ouse bench’. The word was also applied to other bench-sitting situations, especially in the legal profession, and became part of standard English, but it never lost its original tavern use.

beraffled (adjective)

Yorkshire

Perplexed, entangled. ‘Ah’s sair beraffled what te deea’ – what to do. It’s the notion of entanglement that points to the word’s origin, where there seems to be a link with the random elements seen in a pile of raff (‘rubbish’) or a riff-raff (‘rabble’) – words which came into English from French in the fifteenth century. It can indeed be a perplexing business, sorting out a tangle of odds and ends.

betwattled (adjective)

Cornwall, Cumberland, Devon, Lancashire, Northamptonshire, Northumberland, Somerset, Yorkshire

Confused, bewildered. The word turns up all over the country in a remarkable variety of forms – betrattlt in Cumberland; bewottled in Northamptonshire; betotled and bedwadled in Devon; bewattled in Cornwall. From Yorkshire: ‘Ah’s fairly betwattled and baffounded’. The root, twattle, clearly has its place in a family of echoic words all expressing a notion of ‘foolish talk’ or ‘gossip’, and looks like a blend of twaddle and tittle-tattle. An interesting extension was recorded in North Yorkshire: if you were betwattled there, you were hardly sober.

betwittered (adjective)

Yorkshire

Excited, frightened – anything, in fact, which might cause you to twitter, meaning ‘tremble’. Joseph Wright adds the gloss ‘overcome with pleasing excitement’, bringing his entry on this word up to 130 characters (including spaces), and thereby anticipating another possible application a century later.

birthy (adjective)

Ireland, Northumberland, Scotland

Numerous, prolific. From Northern Ireland: ‘Them beans is very birthy’. Potatoes were described as birthy too, if they had a good number of tubers at each stalk. All the recorded instances seem to be agricultural. An ideal word for exhibits at County Shows.

blaff (noun or verb)

Scotland

To go bang, or the bang that results. Guns went blaff, as did dogs (‘bark’), but a blaff was also a blow, physical or otherwise. In Chapter 2 of Samuel Rutherford Crockett’s The Men of the Moss-Hags (1895), two women are fleeing from sheep-stealers, and have a tough ride home without mishap, but then one is wounded when almost at their house. She wryly observes: ‘Tha hardest blaff of down-come is ever gotten at the doorstep’. Very true.

blashy (adjective)

Cumberland, Durham, Ireland, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, Northumberland, Scotland, Warwickshire, Yorkshire

Rainy, gusty; wet, muddy; weak, watery; frivolous, overtalkative. The weather, roads, fields, ale, tea, and conversation could all be blashy. Splash lies behind all these senses, for an interesting phonetic reason. When splash is spoken, the s makes the p change its normal character (technically, it loses its aspiration), so that it sounds more like a b. The first three senses are fairly obvious developments; the fourth is unexpected, though to think of frivolity as someone splashing around in speech or behaviour is rather appealing.

blawp (noun and verb)

Scotland

Belch, burp. This is simply a contracted form of blow up, with the open Scots vowel shown by the aw spelling. I don’t think there’s any connection with Blawp, the alien digital character created by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop for the 1998 film Lost in Space, but I might be wrong.

blodder (verb)

Westmorland

Of liquor: to flow with a gurgling sound out of a vessel with a narrow aperture, such as a beer or wine bottle. ‘It’s o’ bloddered away oot o’ t’bottle’. There may be a link with blood. It turns up as blutter in Scotland. It was also used when someone (especially a child) was crying excessively: ‘What for is thoo blodderin an rooarin?’ What’s not clear is which came first – the liquor or the kids.

bluify (verb)

Hertfordshire

To become blue. ‘My hands are quite blueified with the cold’. The -ify suffix has a long history of making verbs from adjectives, all expressing the idea of ‘bringing into a certain state’, as with horrify and stupify. The coinages have often been playful or jocular, as with speechify. But bluify evidently met a need. I wonder just how many other colours were treated in the same way? There’s no dialect record of a yellowify or greenify, yet.

blup (noun)

Scotland

A misfortune brought on through lack of foresight. If you have been blupt, you’ve been overtaken by a misfortune that you might have avoided if you’d been more cautious. In Lothian, anyone making a clumsy or awkward appearance was also called a blup. There are echoes in blooper and muppet.

blutterbunged (adjective)

Lincolnshire

Overcome by surprise – so that no talk (blather) can come out (because you’re ‘bunged up’ with the emotion of the occasion). In 1890 Wright reports a story of a preacher in a chapel who had just spoken the biblical text ‘Behold, the Bridegroom cometh’ when in walked a newly married couple. This so put him off that he exclaimed: ‘Well, mi brethren, I’m clean blutterbunged!’

bobbersome (adjective)

Cheshire, Lancashire, Northumberland, Shropshire, Westmorland, Yorkshire

In high spirits, bold, forward, impatient. From Shropshire: ‘Dunna yo be too bobbersome wi’ yore money’. The word could be a compliment or a criticism. One Lancashire writer is delighted with his new cap: ‘isn’t it bobbersome!’ Another finds being compared to a hedgehog is ‘a bit too bobbersome’. Bob is the source of the word, with its meaning of ‘move quickly up and down’ transferred to a state of mind.

bodderment see botherment

bogfoundered (adjective)

Cheshire

Perplexed, bewildered. According to the Altrincham Guardian in 1896, a woman said ‘she was bogfoundered in the matter’ – swallowed up in a bog. Bog was used in this part of the country to mean a dilemma or quandary: ‘Oo towd [you told] me th’ same thing o’er and o’er again till a wur aw [I were all] in a bog’.

boldrumptious (adjective)

Kent

Presumptuous. A blend of bold and rumpus, along with the -ious ending, meaning ‘full of’, seen in such words as fictitious and (strongly echoed here) bumptious. Or maybe the ending was the -uous heard in presumptuous, but mispronounced. Either way, it resulted in a forceful expression, as here: ‘That there upstandin’ boldrumptious blousing [wild] gal of yours came blarin’ down to our house’.

bombaze see bumbaze

boneshave (noun)

Devon, Somerset

Sciatica. The shave part is an old use of this word to mean ‘scrape’ or ‘chafe’. Exmoorians used to try to charm it away, hoping water would carry the disease down to the sea. Affected people had to lie on their back on the bank of a stream, with a straight staff by their side between them and the water, while these words were repeated over them:

Bone-shave right,

Bone-shave strite [ = straight],

As tha watter rins by tha stave,

Zo follow bone-shave.

Worth a try, but in the case reported by Joseph Wright the sufferer died the next day.

boodyankers (interjection)

Northumberland

An exclamation of surprise or delight. The etymology is unclear, but there are echoes of boo, used to surprise or give a fright. Perhaps boody was an avoidance of bloody. The ending sounds playful. It beats gosh, no question.

botherment or bodderment (noun)

Cumberland, Devon, Somerset, Westmorland, Yorkshire

Trouble, difficulty. It seems in these parts of the country there was a need for something in between the mildness of bother and the forcefulness of botheration, which was so strong that it was often used as an exclamation. Judging by this Cumberland example, it was quite a punchy word: ‘A heap eh balderdash an bodderment’. Or this one from Westmorland: ‘I want nin o’ thi bodderment’.

boundsy (adjective or noun)

Yorkshire

Said of someone who is stout and unusually active when walking, so that one notices the person’s size. The word presumably wasn’t entirely complimentary, as the -sy suffix is usually associated with a tone of mockery or dismissiveness, as in artsy-fartsy and folksy. The bound part reflects the girth, not the exercise. As an adjective, in this part of the country, bound meant ‘of large circumference’ (compare boundary). A lady wearing a large hooped petticoat could be described as ‘boundsy’.

bowdykite (noun)

Durham, Northumberland, Yorkshire

A corpulent person. A bowdy, in Northumberland, was a large wooden bowl, and the kite, a bird of prey, was often used to describe someone who was greedy – hence the compound for a ‘fatty’ (all the recorded examples refer only to men). From Yorkshire: ‘Off he set, as hahd as ivver his bowdykite legs wad carry him’. Rather less obvious was bowdykite as a term of contempt for a forward or precocious child, especially one behaving stupidly. There may be echoes of ‘bighead’ – bowden is recorded further north with the meaning of ‘swollen’.

bowzelly (adjective)

Scotland, Sussex

Unkempt, tangled – pronounced ‘boozly’. A contributor from Selkirkshire talks of ‘bowzelly hair’, where it seems to mean ‘bushy’, and an adaptation of bushy could be the origin. On the other hand, there was a verb bowze used in parts of Scotland and the North of England meaning ‘rush’ (like the wind) or ‘gush forth’, so that’s a possible origin too.

brabagious (adjective)

Scotland, Sussex

Cantankerous. ‘You nasty brabagious creature’ turns up in the middle of a Sussex argument. The word probably comes from brabble, widely used across the Midlands and North of England to mean a quarrel. In Act 4 Scene 8 of Shakespeare’s Henry V, the Welsh Captain Fluellen advises a soldier: ‘keep you out of prawls, and prabbles, and quarrels’ – his Welsh accent appearing in the p- spellings.

brackle (adjective)

Lancashire, Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Northamptonshire, Staffordshire, Suffolk, Yorkshire

Brittle, crumbling. In its agricultural sense, referring to stems of wheat that snap off short, brackle – related to break – wouldn’t be of general interest. But it didn’t stop there. Weather that was unsettled came to be described as brackle – or, in some places, brockle or bruckle. But whatever the pronunciation, a ‘brackle day’ would be one where calm weather was breaking up around you. ‘Right brackly today’, you might say.

braddled (adjective)

Leicestershire

Comfortably warmed through. ‘You’re nicely braddled!’ – said to a child whose feet had been held near the fire. It’s from an Old English verb meaning ‘to roast’.

briss (noun)

Devon, Somerset

Dust and fluff that accumulates behind furniture. There’s probably a distant relation to break, and a closer one to Irish English, where briss meant ‘broken pieces’ or ‘little bits’ (from the Gaelic verb bris, ‘break’). From Somerset: ‘Clean up all this briss behind the picture’. If the dust has accumulated along with the bits and pieces caught in cobwebs, it was briss and buttons. Why buttons? The phrase was also used for sheep’s droppings. Today briss would gain a second lease of life to describe the gunk that accumulates between the keys on a computer keyboard.

brittner (noun)

Westmorland, Yorkshire

A term of commendation for a clever, active, or useful man or boy. From Yorkshire: ‘Set thy shoodher tiv it, an push like a brittner’. Like a Briton.

broggle (verb)

Ireland, Lancashire, Lincolnshire, Scotland, Westmorland, Yorkshire

Push with a pointed instrument, poke. Brog was used in Scotland and the North Country with this meaning, and broggle seems to add a nuance of repeated action. From Lincolnshire: ‘You’re alus [always] brogglin’ at th’ fire; noä wonder it can’t bo’n [burn]’. A broggle was an ineffectual attempt, and a broggler someone who tried and failed – a bungler.

broodle (verb)

Devon, Lincolnshire, Shropshire

Let a child lie till quite awake. From Devon, of a child just waking up: ‘Purty thing, it hathn’t broodled yet’. The source is the farmyard: a hen brooding over her chickens. But anyone sitting in a meditative way might be said to be broodling.

bruff (adjective)

Ireland, Kent, Lancashire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Sussex, Westmorland, Worcestershire, Yorkshire

Well and hearty, in appearance and manners; somewhat rough and blunt in manner. In other words, if someone said you were bruff, you’d have no idea whether they were being nice or nasty, without seeing their face and noting the context. The same ambiguity was found with bluff, from which it probably derives.

buck-thwanging or -swanging (noun)

Lancashire, Yorkshire

The punishment of swinging a person against a wall. An old meaning of swing was ‘throw with force’, and from that developed a verb swang, ‘to swing to and fro’. A thwang was a ‘blow’. And buck reflects the action of a deer leaping from the ground and arching its back. Whatever the etymology, the result must have been quite painful. Apparently it was used in some trades when a worker was thought to have let his fellows down – such as by being lazy or drunk.

buldering (adjective)

Cornwall, Devon, Somerset

Of weather or the sky: threatening, thundery, sultry. A Devonshire spelling suggests its origin: ‘Great bouldering clouds’ – like boulders. Buldery and boldery were used in the same way. From Somerset: ‘We shall have rain avore long, looks so buulduree’ – the double u suggesting the pronunciation ‘bool-dry’.

bumbaze or bombaze (verb)

Norfolk, Northumberland, Scotland, Suffolk

Bewilder, look aghast. From Northumberland: ‘Aw was fairly bumbazed, like a dog in a dancin’. There was a verb baze, meaning ‘astonish’, which came into English from Dutch, and bumbaze could be a playful, resonant intensifying of that. But it has echoes of bamboozle and amaze too. All the recorded examples show it to have been a forceful expression, often reinforced by a word meaning ‘absolutely’. From Ayrshire: ‘clean bumbazed’. From Norfolk: ‘right on bombazed’.

buzgut (noun)

Cornwall

A great eater or drinker. The first part has nothing to do with ‘buzzing’, even though it sounds as if it does. It’s from an Old Cornish word for ‘food’.

buzznacking (verb or noun)

Cumberland, Devon, Somerset, Yorkshire

Fussing, gossiping. It seems to be a blend of buzz, meaning ‘gossip, tell tales’, and knack, ‘chatter’ – so anyone buzznacking is really going on and on. But knack could also mean ‘talk in an affected way, copying educated, southern speech’. From North Yorkshire: ‘She knacks and knappers [rattles on] like a London miss’. Such accents were often criticized locally. From Cumberland: ‘She knacks and talks like rotten sticks’. (Knack could also mean snap or crack.)