Saturday, October 09, 2004

more peculiar phrases

Yorkshire is a pretty cool place. It's the home of yorkshire pudding (a mixture of animal fat and flour which is baked and served covered in gravy), those cute and fluffy terriers, a brilliant and famous Monty Python skit ("When ah were a lad, we lived in cardboard box on middle'o'road...") and massive pig farms. I remember years ago I went to Wakefield (...which is in Yorkshire...) to visit a friend I'd met in Hawaii (you get that when you travel a bit), he asked me how I could handle travelling on my own and being "on my tod". I looked at him funny, until he explained that it meant "on my own".

These memories all flooded back to me this morning when I was perusing the news, and I read this article about a training course for foreign doctors who're practicing in this lovely and friendly part of the UK. Despite their excellent English skills, they were bemused by patients complaining of sore "lugholes", constantly feeling "jiggered" or an unreliable "doofer".

2 comments:

Pickwick said...

I love all of that colloquial vernacular! When I was in NZ for a few months, yers ago, there were a few times that I had to nod and smile a few times until I was able to form a translation of particular words... And we're so close as well!

Violet said...

And I remember when I first went to Aus the guys kept asking me to say "six" and giggling like schoolgirls when I did....