share your local words, phrases and colloquialisms

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Where I live (North Staffordshire, UK) there's quite a few quirky colloquialisms. With some of these, I wasn't aware they were unique to my area until using them at school up in Manchester:

* People often call each other "duck" as a term of endearment (i.e. "y'alright, duck?")
* "Nesh" is an adjective for someone who feels the cold easily. Can also be used to describe someone as weak or feeble
* "Slat" - means to throw. Can also be used to describe heavy rain - "slatting it down"
* I often call a slice of bread a "round" and a bread roll a "bap"

Last edited by Leahcar on 14 Dec 2017, 5:05 pm, edited 2 times in total.

"Hit the table"(and scissors will answer you).
"Fall on a tree"(you damn monkey).

That would be "siling it down" a bit further north in Yorkshire/Lancashire, or "raining stair-rods".
And everyone gets called "love" rather than "duck".

Where I live in Louisiana, it's more common for people to "axe" you a question, rather than "ask" you a question.

And in some parts of South London too

In Maine, when tourists ask for directions: "You can't get theya from heeya".

Where I live ASKED is said AST and sometimes ASK is also said that way

New Yorkers say "aks" for "ask," too.

My father had to drum it into me to say "ask." He had me practice in front of him, in fact.

I still say "aks" sometimes.

Round these parts "oo" in some words gets split into two syllables rather like that, but with a "w" in the middle...

"Tha'll 'after tek tha' boowits off 'fore getting in t'swimmin' poowil."


You must mean that "Sarf Landin" place my step-Dad used to tell me about? He was a Southall ("Sarfuw") lad, and his accent and dialect is still very strong. I remember him really confusing me when I was a kid, because he uses the "royal we" all the time (using "we" to mean "I") - I could never fathom whether he had done things alone or with company.

I think of that as a Black thing. But I guess every ethnic group in NYC indulgences in "axe murdering" the English language by "axing you questions". Lol!

That's funny, my dad says "nesh" is a Manchester word. If I ever complain about being cold I get called a nesh git.

In Cumbria, UK they have:
"yan" for "one"
"clarty" for "dirty"
"lonnin" for "small lane/road"
"have a ratch" for "have a look" (I'd say "have a skeg" which I think is a Yorkshire one)

Piddlin' around and gommin' around.Means when you really aren't doing anything.Same as fooling around.
Tump to knock over.
Jip a female dog.
Peach orchard boar a womanizer.
Guzzletoot your throat.
Wampus cat or wild cat is moonshine.
Biddies refers to baby chickens or old women.
Trifling a worthless person.

Speaking of the confusion about the word "pecker", in North America "fanny" is kind of a cutesy-sounding word meaning a person's rear end, but not too long ago I learned English-peaking countries like Australia and New Zealand it's a not-so-cutesy word for a different and specifically female body part. This was after I had seen a guy in NZ review a video game with Angelica from Rugrats and he called her a fanny, which I found kind of odd. So I looked it up. Ew.

So if I told a person from a different English-speaking country "Get off your fanny", or even worse, "I'm gonna kick your fanny"...

Fanny can also be a name for a girl, but I don't think it's too popular for both those reasons.

Yeah that would be a linguistic shock to me to.

I'm an American. So to me "Fanny" means either a woman's nickname, or a person's (usually female) rear end. Not the vagina.

But I just now learned something.

Your post got me curious about ladies named "Fanny" in both fact and in fiction.

So I just now googled "Fanny Hill". I knew it was novel, but just now learned from Wiki that it was a scandalous pornographic novel penned in 18th century England. The main character is a lady named "Frances Hill", who goes by the name "Fanny". But it turns out that "Fanny Hill" is also a sly English language adaption of the latin phrase "Venus mons" (mound of Venus) for the curve in your body made by the pubic bone just above your genitals.

Hmmm....

Long story short: My discovery about Fanny Hill probably indicates that the "frontal" meaning of Fanny probably evolved in England about the time the novel was written in the 1750. So it was after the American colonies had all been founded (the Brits still ruled us but our dialect had already split from theirs). And that our "rear" meaning evolved here in America and never got to England. And then later (when the Brits settled Australia and New Zealand) those countries inherited the frontal meaning from England. Just my theory.

I'm from Salford (NW England in case you don't know)

Im getting a fat scran from the chippy.

At my high school there was a girl whose last name was Butt. (She was actually very popular, believe it or not!) But her first name wasn't Fanny, that would probably have doomed her forever.