Herefordshire Dialect

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31530, 18 November 1967, Page 5

Herefordshire Dialect

Winifred Leeds talked in a: 8.8. C. broadcast about some discoveries she made in compiling a book on Herefordshire dialect. “What was I to understand by: ‘Have you heard the charm in the kitchen?’: ‘lt is a pity the baby is so nesh’; ‘She is a sprack young piece’; ‘We have got a boughten cake’; and the gardener’s reply of ‘Just a snatch.’ when asked if he would like someI thing to eat? I “ ‘Charm in the kitchen'? | My mind flew to witches' j charms and incantations, but what 1 discovered was the twittering of a little robin. Of course Milton's ‘charm of birds' in 'Paradise Lost’: Sweet is the breadth of morn. : her rising sweet with charm of earliest birds.' I "Nowadays it can also mean ( the prattle of children or the twittering of women's voices. I Old English ‘nesh’ is ‘deli-1

i cate.’ and has a modern meanI ing of not very tough: unable (to stand cold or discomfort.’ I “ ‘Boughten’—‘a boughten cake'—is the opposite of home-baked. (We don’t say ‘home-made.’) It is always used apologetically, so we can imagine the embarrassment of the farmer’s wife offering some boughten cheese to guests, when they, thinking they were on the track of a (new kind of cheese, replied: j ‘We have had Wensleydale land Cheddar before, but I never Boughten.' ‘Sprack’— (sprightly, lively, is the same as Shakespeare’s ‘sprag,’ and ‘snatch’— a snack, is used by his contemporaries Beaumont and Fletcher. Lately 1 have heard of a child trying to blow bubbles being told to i ‘flabber the water up and I make a flaw.’ ‘Flabber’—whisk [ up; and ‘flaw’ must be old (English ‘flawn,' a thick cusI tard.”