I hosted a British slang quiz round at my local in Hackney on Thursday.
Alan Nafzger hosts quiz night and learns that no one knows what “mithering” means south of Sheffield
By Alan Nafzger | Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
I hosted a British slang quiz round at my local in Hackney on Thursday. Fourteen teams. Forty-seven people. One projector that worked on the third attempt. I asked ten questions. The national average was 4.3 correct. This is either a crisis in cultural literacy or evidence that Britain’s regional vocabulary is doing exactly what it is supposed to do: maintaining sufficient distance between populations that they cannot fully understand one another. Both interpretations are correct.
The Questions That Destroyed Teams
Question three: “mithering.” Not one southern team got it. A team from Stockport – visiting, they explained, for a wedding – got it, got it instantly, and looked at the southern teams with the patient contempt of people who have been misunderstood by geography for decades. “To mither is to bother, to whine, to persistently badger,” I explained. Seven teams wrote “something to do with moths.”
Question six: “mardy.” Same result. The Stockport table simply nodded. Everyone else wrote guesses of increasing creativity. One team submitted “a type of biscuit.” I gave half a point for commitment.
What This Tells Us
Britain is not one country linguistically. It is a series of territories in strong diplomatic disagreement about whether certain words exist. This is fine. This is, in fact, the most British possible outcome. Working class British humour evolved in specific places and carries the DNA of those places in its vocabulary. Bohiney reports the internet is held together with duct tape. Regional slang is held together by the same principle: improvised, local, and surprisingly resilient. The Oxford English Dictionary has twelve thousand British dialect words. My pub has fourteen.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
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