Trying Again
Apr. 22nd, 2012 02:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mistaj
Out and Nout (or Something and Nothing)
By Jet Spero
It’s Saturday morning, and my partner Johnathan has just arrived home from his night shift. We sit and drink coffee whilst catching each other up with our nights. It’s a very civilised affair and I grow to like it immensely because it makes a form of sense that little else does. But now and again we will flummox each other slightly, quite without meaning to.
Such a situation was as follows: He made another pot of coffee and said ‘I’m going to go put some clothes on.’
How I interpreted this was that he was going to take off his work clothes, possibly have a wash, maybe not, and then put some clothes on and be back downstairs within maybe fifteen minutes.
What actually happened was that he went upstairs, had an hour long bath, and then came down in a dressing gown.
I presented him with a bit of a quizzical look when he came downstairs, and he explained that he’d changed his mind half way up the stairs and just forgotten to tell me.
However, we do have some communication breakdowns sometimes. My boyfriend is from down South, whereas I’m a Northerner through and through. I was raised in tiny villages in the middle of the Lancashire countryside, and in my later teens I grew up on a farm. He lived in London, and just as I didn’t go to London until I was eighteen, he hadn’t been to the North ‘til he moved up for University at the same age.
Most of the time it’s fine, we’re able to communicate fully and understand one another. But at times it takes a few moments thought before things make sense.
The most obvious example of this is the names we have for meal times. In the North we call our main meal of the day tea. In the South they call it dinner, and ‘tea’ is reserved for ‘afternoon tea’. The Northern version of dinner is usually eaten at around noon, whereas the same meal in the South would be called lunch.
Before Johnathan and I lived together, if we invited each other over for tea, we would have to clarify whether we meant Northern tea or Southern tea. (I made sure that if I invited him over for ‘Southern tea’ I’d just give in and call it coffee!) And let’s not get into the difference between ‘bait’ and ‘packed lunch’/‘lunch pack’.
Of course once we did move in together, we found even more little dialect differences that could potentially confuse, for example the different interpretations of ‘pants’. In the South, pants are what you wear under your trousers. In the North your pants are your trousers. This made for an interesting situation, when I - a Northerner, asked Johnathan - a Southerner to iron my pants…
Another potentially humorous/disastrous example is the expression ‘knocked me up’. In the South this generally means somebody got the individual pregnant whereas in the north (or Lancashire at least) it means woke the person up. I must have sounded strange when I went on a trip to London and was asked whether I wanted a wake up call – I responded ‘No thanks, my stepdad will knock me up.’
A couple of ones we Northerners take for granted are ‘out, nout, and summat.’ I thought everyone knew these, but the following exchange proved otherwise:
“Do you want a drink?” Asks my doting partner.
‘Yes please.’ I respond.
“What would you like?” He enquires.
‘Oh… out cold please.’ I answer, confident I will be understood.
“What? You want to be knocked out or you want to go out?” He replies, puzzled.
‘What? I mean I want anything cold!’
For anyone unfamiliar with these terms, ‘out’ means ‘anything’ or occasionally ‘something’ as in ‘out or nout’ – ‘something or nothing’ and it’s usually used as follows: ‘What have you been up to, out or nout?’ And as for ‘summat’ it just means ‘something’. Obviously…
So perhaps our dialect is not quite as universal as we sometimes believe it to be.
Do you have any examples of being misunderstood because of using dialect words you thought were fairly common? If so please share them!
