SHOCKING WORDS

The next post will be on or before Saturday April 22nd

SHOCKING WORDS

When I was living in North Cumbria, between 1987 and 2013, the principal local paper was the Cumberland News which served the Brampton, Longtown and Carlisle areas, and was read as far as the small West Cumbrian townships of Wigton (birthplace of the novelist and TV celebrity Melvyn Bragg, born 1939) and Aspatria (genteelly pronounced ‘Spee-ya-tree’ in the local dialect). I am not usually a fan of regional newspapers unless it be for their unwitting comedy value, though now and again the unintended inanity or even borderline but wholly innocent obscenity makes you wonder what the so-called editors were doing when the thing went to press (you’re right, they were having their liquid lunches and in addition these days like everyone else they are playing all day with their phones). As a mildish example of something truly outlandish making it into print, note first that there was a long-established vogue in the advertising pages of the News, for friends (and also, I would wager, covert enemies) of someone celebrating their birthday, to wish them some kind of humorous greeting complete with mugshot of the birthday boy or birthday gal. Often their comical childhood nickname was alluded to and very frequently there was a charming black and white photo of the 21 or 50 or 60-year-old celebrant when they were only a beaming mite of an infant. The caption would read something like, ‘Who’s this funny little feller, do you think? Yes, it’s you, Uncle Jim, better known as Tucker Lad to your mates, and Happy 60^th Birthday, and make sure you get good and legless with Stotty and Ponce in The Wheatsheaf tonight! Love from all the family and not forgetting Elvis the Dog and Marty the chinchilla.’

All that is passable enough of course, but imagine my astonishment one morning about a decade ago, whilst scanning those magnetic pages, to behold smack in the centre of the double fold, the following salutation:

Hi there, Pissy Wissy!

Eh?What was that? I had obviously misread and surely it was Pussy Wussy? No no, it was Pissy Wissy alright. This quaint uriniferous gent with the rhyming handle turned out to be 21 today, and his photo showed him to be a placid, presentable enough dark haired lad, who looked like a junior bank employee… and the forthright greeting was from his avowed best mates Slick and Wazzer and Horsey. I paused and blinked and wondered, did Mr P Wissy Esq relish their bluff comradely affection to such an extent he saw his appalling nickname as a harmless part of the nascent Cumbrian buddy culture… and rather more worrying than that, and assuming that he did actually work in a bank, would his friendly customers, very old ladies for example with substantial savings, whisper to him now admiringly, I never knew that you were a Pissy Wissy, Geoffrey? In our days they were always known as Piss-a-Beds…

In the dim old pre-internet days, at least they had an excuse for their cultural naivety, and once in the early 1980s there was a riveting if startling example in one of the sister papers of the Cumberland News, called The Workington Times and Star. In 2005 I happened to be working as Dialect Writer in Residence in Workington, which incidentally was the hallowed town where I pursued my secondary education, at the Brothel on the Hill (I know I tell this gag a lot, but it was a statistical fact that circa 1970 the biggest number of pregnant single students at nearby Didsbury Teachers’ Training College, Manchester, all hailed from that legendary alma mater where I did my O and A levels). My splendid post as dialect expert was alas rather Kafka-style pointless as West Cumbrian Workington itself is singularly weak on dialect on account of being heavily Yorkshirised by historical inroaders. In the 19^th century the massive Workington steel industry, home of the Bessemer converter, invited a necessary extra workforce and was flooded by men from South Dronfield, Yorkshire and they were known as the Dronnies. That dominant and much more intelligible Dronnie twang, effectively squeezed out the dialect to the villages north along the Solway Coast, which meant I could only find dialect speakers by deserting the place where I was supposed to be unearthing them. Add to that that my line managers were cheery non Cumbrians who supposedly adored the dialect but didn’t understand a single word of it (apart from ‘yis’ and ‘naw’ and ‘nowt’ and ‘mebbe’) and were thus unable to benefit from the fruits of my unique research, and which amounts to yet another 2 or 3 for the price of 1, because in my work scenario you had the absurdity of Beckett and Pirandello chucked in for good measure alongside that of Franz Kafka.

It was while I was researching comic dialect stories throughout the decades, that I came upon a truly preposterous thing. The local library possessed microfiche copies of the Times and Star going back a very long way, and thus I was able to enjoy some of the virtuoso and very funny Cummerlan Tyals of Rita Derwent (a pen name whose surname was that of the local river) which every week described the farcical adventures of a wonderfully naïve farming couple from the back of beyond, and was entitled Jobby and Mary’s Crack. Apropos which everyone knows that ‘crack’ is a pan Northern, Scots and Irish term that means gossipy conversation, but it can also have an obvious bawdy signification in standard English, and this was the clue to what I was to unearth in one of the tales from the year 1980. Tellingly the front page of that issue disclosed that 2 young women social workers were protesting against the Men Only Bar in one of Workington town centre’s boozers, and while not being manhandled or abused had tried in vain to purchase pints for themselves from the adamant bar staff. As a sign of an overall Neanderthal civic spirit, it now revealed its regional literary counterpart in the centre pages’ Cummerlan Tyal replete with a humorous line drawing. Here we were informed in dialect that Jobby had been having severe problems eating his dinner on account of the cut price dentures he possessed being singularly ineffective at masticating the tougher types of meat, meaning neck of lamb and string beef especially. Jobby’s crude if ingenious notion was to go out into the farmyard and get the old revolving grindstone whirling and then to skilfully file his plastic gnashers to a lethal edge. All very entertaining, to be sure, and in Rita’s untranslatable and excellent dialect at times painfully funny. Yet bizarrely and it was only when I was half way through the story, that my eyes took in the most striking story title which no doubt innocent Rita (then I believe in her early 60s) had never for a moment deliberated upon, as the relevant allophone she had probably never even heard of in all her sheltered fellside hinterland life.

The story was called:

Jobby Juss Cun’t Manish His Cummerlan Styeuh!

That’s right, ‘Jobby Just Couldn’t Manage his Cumberland Stew!’, the latter being an aqueous confection of cheap and squelchy lamb, sliced black pudding, coarsely cut potatoes and carrots, together with a penetrating and unique culinary aroma reminiscent of long unlaundered male underwear

One of those dialect words as you can see succeeds in not being actionable by the addition of a decorous if rather random apostrophe. For as I said, it had obviously never entered artless old Rita’s head that she had put a compositional foot amiss. But what about the good old sub editor and the good old editor and even the typesetter and the tea boy back in 1980 on the Workington Times and Star of nearly 40 years ago? What the hell were they up to that they likewise didn’t even notice the glaring bawdiness themselves, for assuredly it was done with no deliberate sabotage style intent?

Easy. They were sat half tight, a hundred yards down the road in the Men Only Bar, over and over again cheerily blurting out what joy it was to get away from the tyranny of women, so that they could swear  as much as they liked and wassaword, what’s the expression, let it all hang bloody out. Hic hic.