Twittens, frellits and dumfunglers

One thing I've noticed in my move from suburb of Londinium to the Kingdom of the East Saxons is that people here are...well...different. They say 'good morning' to you. They smile at you in the supermarket queue. They hand you back the wallet (contents intact) that you inadvertantly left in a shop an hour before. And they stop their cars and make a friendly gesture for you to cross the road without a hint of wanting to mow you down. Now, all this is very strange for a cynical ex-copper more used to making sure his wristwatch is still there after shaking hands with someone. But I'm starting to get used to it, and doing my own fair share of smiling and nodding.

I was in conversation with one of our neighbours the other day; a Sussex lady, born and bred, when she happened to use the word twitten. Now, I wasn't sure at first whether I had misheard, and that she was, in fact, talking about Twitter, the micro-blogging site. I hadn't misheard. A twitten is a Sussex dialect word for a narrow alley or passage.

When one thinks of dialect, one does not, perhaps, immediately think of East Sussex. After all, Brighton is practically a suburb of London; it's only an hour and a half from the metropolis by train; and it's full of members of the chattering classes like the ones you've seen on Location cubed. But 'twas not always thus. The journey from London down to Sussex was once far more arduous and dangerous than it is now, and not something to be undertaken on a whim. Mail coach passengers were rattled around in badly-sprung horse-drawn contraptions for at least eight hours on roads that were thick with mud in winter, and dusty tracks in summer. Coach travel could also be dangerous; on one dark night the 'Independent' mail-coach overturned at Findon, throwing the passengers into the road and crushing one elderly man to death under the body of the coach. Most people couldn't afford the luxury of coach travel anyway; many never got further than the nearest market town, and a good many others never left the confines of their villages, because everything they needed (which was, in truth, very little) could be found within their own community. So it was that people in these remote areas came to have their own private vocabulary before the days of universally available newspapers and our 24 hour electronic media; and fortunately, much of that vocabulary has been recorded. I am grateful to the Rev W.D. Parish, Vicar of Selmeston, whose dictionary of Sussex dialect was published in 1875.

Here are a few dialect words that may amuse:

Amendment - manure (adds a whole new meaning to 'pleading the Fifth Amendent')

Backsters - wide pieces of wood, worn on the feet by fishermen who have to walk over shingle or soft mud. (Also known as flappers - it seems odd that such a specific item should have two names!).

Balderdash - an obscene conversation (not sure whether the lexicographer meant Criminal Conversation - the old expression for adultery).

Lawyer - a bramble bush (so named because, like lawyers, the bush is hard to escape from once it has hold of you).

Mints - the mites found in cheese or flour. Not like After Eight mints, then.

Naughty-Man's-Plaything (stop it!) - a stinging nettle.

Rebellious - bilious.

Yeasty - gusty or stormy.

I think such words add richness to the language, which I believe is becoming too homogeneous. It's my view that we should start using slang or dialect of our own making in conversation. I'll get you started with some that Stevyn Colgan and I came up with long since:

Strug - a flat piece of wood with no useful purpose.

Thwackett - two strugs tied together.

Scritchylumps - an irritation of the skin caused by sleeping in silage.

Frellit - the middle prong of a three-pronged fork. (The outside prongs don't have names. What would be the point?)

Sturmers - the buttocks.

Drongler - a novice bell-ringer.

Dumfungler - any ideas?

I look forward to hearing your own in good time, which I shall, of course, steal and send to a publisher, drang my old sturmers with a thwackett if I don't!

Singing like a canary

Well. I've finally bowed to the pressure of no-one in particular and signed myself up to Twitter. No, it isn't a magazine published by the RSPB, but rather a kind of micro-blogging service which asks the question, what are you doing? Users can send and receive messages of no more than 140 characters (known as Tweets) to their circle of acquaintances, and have the opportunity to follow the ramblings of others. It certainly seems to have taken the internet world by storm, including within its members Barack Obama, Richard Branson, Stephen Fry, and many other stars of stage, screen and surgery.

Remember the fun we had with the word blog? I think we could make a go of Twitter and Tweet as well. Is a user of Twitter just a Twit? Would the comments of a gentleman who makes bread be a Baker's Tweet? How many users are there in the little Welsh town of Lllantwit Major? And, if there are any French users out there, will we be able to read the Tweeties of Versailles? This has endless possibilities for someone like me who has an infinite capacity for wasting time when I should be doing something else. Like decorating. I did point out to the worthy Stevyn Colgan that I really needed something more personally appropriate; a micro-blogging site called Gibber, perhaps. But, until someone far more computer-savvy than me comes along to do the honours, I'll be twittering along from my small twig in Sussex.