The last few hours of the day. Last few hours of blue skies. When we wake tomorrow, the rain will have arrived. Then it’s Yorkshire summer weather…. Cool, windy and generally a bit damp. There is a local expression

The kinda weather that puts hairs on ya back.

I would rather have those hairs on the top of my head thank you very much. Like many places we have our fair share of odd local expressions. Books as long as War and Peace have been written about the art of speaking proper Yorkshire. Most of those books are currently waiting translation into other languages, including English. A few examples of the local dialect include

  • Did I eckers like (of course I did not)
  • Wang eh o’er (please could you pass me that)
  • Ow much (that’s rather expensive)
  • Ay could’ve huffed tha we ma stic’o Rhubard (how did that batsman miss that really easy ball)
  • Ya daf hapeth (that was a bit of a mistake that you have just made)
  • Da’s nowt s’queer as folk (people can be a little odd at times)
  • Topped his clogs (unfortunately someone has just died)
  • Now lad it’s jiggered (excuse me sir that item is broken)
  • Tha’s a reyt Bobby Dazzler (you are looking lovely)
  • Yer brews mashin (the tea is in the teapot and will be strong enough in about a days time)
  • Ya betta count yer goolies (I am very sorry that very hard cricket ball has struck you in that painful spot, are they ok)
  • Ya doin ma eddin (You are confusing me)

I have a soft local accent. An accent I guess my Dad would have called ‘posh Yorkshire‘. But it’s still Yorkshire and that’s just fine with me. Ok it does have some downsides. Like no voice recognition software has ever been designed to cope with Yorkshire. I remember having a hire car which when I asked the satellite navigation to ‘take me home’ it would repeatedly switch on the heater. Or the time in a London restaurant when I ordered a mushroom pizza and the rather bemused waiter served me a children’s serving of paella.

That’s why you will never catch me doing a video blog. Especially as I have a face perfect for radio……

99 thoughts on “Goodbye Mr Sun”

  2. You freaked me out about sharing videos. Lol… I don’t have any recent videos, but I have some old videos lined up. But I’m selfconcious because I think I sound like a kid in one of them. Goes right along with me looking younger than my age. Andrew said that when he told the nurse over the phone we’ve been married for 25 years she said I didn’t look old enough. I don’t know… it has its upsides and down sides. The video I was thinking of sharing won’t help. Nobody will take me seriously when I’m being serious.

    I won’t remember most of those local sayings, but topped his clogs might stick. That’s a good one! ☺

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    1. I hate seeing myself on video. All I see is Mr Potato Head with a high pitch voice that sounds like someone has just trod on my toe. It’s just not me in that video surely. I suspect that you will be able to cope with life without those little bits of Yorkshire. x

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  4. Haha. Just the morning dose of laughter that the doctor suggested! I have a feeling the camera microphones hate beautiful voices worldwide equally. 😂
    Probably we should do something to defy it. Don’t you think so?

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  6. I love all the different accents of the UK. It’s like all the different accents of the US. I personally don’t think that we SoCal or even up north folks have accents but we all get depicted as stoner surfers. I might call everyone Dude (all genders) but I’m not Jeff Spicoli.

    I pick accents up if I’m around them long enough. People at work used to make fun of me during Hockey Season cuz I’d start speaking with a Canadian accent. Beauty, eh?🤣🤣🤣💌

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  8. My Dad always called me a daft hapeth. Weirdly he was born in India and moved to Hounslow when he was 4 and lived in Wales for his entire adult life.Never lived in Yorkshire in his life. Don’t think even he knows where he picked up the expression but needless to say I never had a clue what he was going on about…

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      1. You too? I once stumped someone so over enthusiastically that, mid appeal I realised a bail had gone up my nostril. There are possibly more painful experiences – childbirth and Brexit being two, of which I’ve experienced one – but this is in the top five, alongside penalty shootouts with Germans, catching my foreskin in my fly and inadvertently biting an electric cable – no, it’s not possible to explain that last one without self-sectioning myself.

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  10. thanks for that..although i could barely read/pronounce them…haha…i often sit and ponder what those from other countries who are learning english must think when they come to the U.S. in that sense we are truly a melting pot. i often cannot understand someone from certain areas well…Boston accents verses the deep south, the ghetto ebonics verses our Pennsylvania dutch population. If i was a foreigner i would think i had come to the wrong country!

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  11. Can’t you please give us a recorded example of your voice, Gary? With a translation of course… lol But don’t worry, you know that the Swiss dialect is impossible to understand for most people in Germany (also a big number of other German dialects carry that challenge). And even under the Swiss, there are dialects they have difficulties to understand… haha.

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      7. Thank God not anymore. We were outside yesterday but decided to stay inside for the rest of the weekend. We will give it another try in Juli…

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  12. A great collection. Given that my maternal grandfather was a Yorkshireman, I knew some of them, but he wasn’t into cricket – although my Lancastrian grandmother was – so I never heard the goodies one.

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  13. Love the sayings – made me smile 🙂 I grew up in the midwest so I can easily pick up a twang. When I moved east I got called out for calling my soda a “pop” or talking about a roof using the word “ruff.” Bob grew up in Philly, so he’s in deep and I am trying my hardest to get the kids to use proper English and not talk like dad for things like water, which he calls “witter.”

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      7. The Smugglers Inn at Ferndown is a popular choice, but that’s in the opposite direction and on the A31 towards Ringwood and Southampton. There’s the World’s End at Almer Nr Blandford which is a little more off the beaten track. I played the piano in there years ago and before one of their revamps apparently my grandmother has signed her name on the low ceiling as had a lot of other people! I don’t know if it’s still open though.

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  16. I love Yorkshire accents. My Mum was from Wiltshire and I like West Country too. My own accent is such a muddle I defy anyone to identify where I am “from”. Actually, I’m not sure myself where that would be!

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      1. I went through a whole series…American when I was 8/9 then for a while I only spoke French, then back to school in North Devon, then to New York. Always wanted to keep what was left of my Brit accent and I’ve had British friends from all over so who knows what I got from them. So many years I’ve been here but a Brit accent makes me, not home sick but nostalgic, I guess. Often wish I had not been sent here! Now share a house with a South African. Not sure who influences who! I love trying to guess where people are from.

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  19. “…when I asked the satellite navigation to ‘take me home’ it would repeatedly switch on the heater.”

    😀 😀 😀 😀

    Thanks for the much needed giggles…at your own expense! 😉

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      1. Yes, it can get annoying, depending who is speaking. I was there too a long time ago. Beautiful country, sad situation which I guess was unavoidable. My brother got “stranded” there by the Virus lock down. He is not pleased due to cold weather!

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