Another week and another regional gem. I was complaining to my wife last night about the sorry state of a couple of my fingers and said that I wished the cold sores would go away.
Displaying masterful restraint with the eye rolling, she said: “Cold sores are a virus, usually around the mouth. What you’ve got is chapped skin, what my mother would call spreathe.” My mother-in-law was from Gloucestershire and a quick Google search reveals that spreathe is a dialect word from south-west England and south Wales, origin obscure.
Other splendid words I’ve been sent recently include taffle, as in “My wool is taffled up” or “this string is all in a taffle” (this from a reader who grew up in Hull); and fuddle. On the latter, correspondent Rachel Fyson writes: “In Nottingham and other parts of the East Midlands it is used to describe a meal where everybody brings something to share (cf ‘food’ and ‘muddle’).
“Until recently, my team at the University of Nottingham often had a fuddle with students to mark the end of term or some other event. However, we now avoid this lovely Nottingham word and call our indoor picnics ‘bring and share’ after being told that in student lingo ‘fuddle’ means something rather different, an amalgam of ‘fuck’ and ‘cuddle’.” Probably a good policy, Rachel.
Tina Lunt, meanwhile, has a full head of steam up: “Please, please save me from the phrase ‘lived experience’. It’s insane. Lived experience as opposed to what? My experience in death? I heard this ludicrous expression on the BBC news last night, on Radio 4 this morning and I’ve even seen it in professional job advertisements.
“Where did it come from? Who invented it? What shade of meaning is it supposed to convey which is not already perfectly well expressed by the adjective ‘personal’?” Count to 10.
Email jonathan.bouquet@observer.co.uk
• Jonathan Bouquet is an Observer columnist
