Rankin’s vennel sin

vennel noun. LME.
[Old French vennel(l)e, vanelle (mod. venelle) from medieval Latin venella dim. of Latin vena vein]
1. A narrow lane or passage between buildings; an alley. Chiefly Scot., Anglo-Irish & north.

Whilst the "Great Greggs Experiment" is ongoing, I'll turn again to the gennel, which has attracted additional comment in the interim (okay, okay, it’s an additional comment, if I’m being completely honest). Other than my mention of the North-East of Scotland’s terms for bread rolls in the last posting, I’ve hardly touched upon the Scots Language (or maybe it's just a dialect of English?) and some of the fantastic words this has to offer.

I feel compelled to take on the mantle of ambassador for my adopted stateless nation and remedy the situation forthwith. Of the various Scots words I’ve picked up in my four and a bit years in Edinburgh, my two favourites are “footerie” meaning “fiddly” and “shoogle” meaning “shake” or “jiggle”. I’ve recently found out that these have some English regional variants, so I’ll perhaps come back to them at some point. However, there are also some very pleasing variants on the alley theme we can look at in the meantime.

It’s August. It's Edinburgh. It's the Festival. The city’s Royal Mile is a seething mass of humanity. Tourists and Festival goers take their chances amongst in amongst the press of leafleters, buskers, comedians, jugglers and actors of the Fringe. Flanking them on either side of the single mile between Edinburgh Castle and the Palace of Holyrood are some 83 alleyways. Like fishbones adjoined to the Royal Mile's spine, these historic pedestrian lanes spider their way down to Princes Street Gardens on the north and to The Cowgate on the south.

All 83 of these alleys are enumerated and their history described in the 122 pocket-sized pages of Close Encounters in the Royal Mile. Within this single mile there are to be found representatives of pretty much all of the Scots words for alleys. Gedde’s Entry, Mary Kings Close, Tolbooth Wynd and St John's Pend are all here and close by, off the Grassmarket, is The Vennel. These five words pend, entry, wynd, vennel and close are common throughout Scotland and some, or all, are to be found in the street names of each of Scotland's cities.

Of the five, my personal favourite is “wynd” although I do have a wee softspot for "pend" too. I spend quite a bit of my time in Aberdeen and Back Wynd can be found off Union Street, the city's main thoroughfare, as can the wonderfully named Correction Wynd; taking its name from the House of Correction which stood there in the Seventeenth Century. Aberdeen, of course, has its own distinct and wonderful variety of Scots: Doric. Again, something for another time.

Interestingly, in Glasgow a "close" is also what in Edinburgh is a "stair" - the communal flight of stairs in a tenement block. I'm not sure if Dundee or Aberdeen have their own alternatives for this. I'm sure someone will let me know.

So, in the names of streets the Scots regional variants for alleys seem to be alive and well, but I'd be interested to hear from native Scots about whether they use these words in their everyday speech. I'll finish, however, by returning to the theme of the modern pressures challenging linguistic variation. It is a story which relates directly to Edinburgh and to one of the vennels of the Royal Mile: Fleshmarket Close.

Ian Rankin’s Rebus novel Fleshmarket Close was published as Fleshmarket Alley in the United States. I had thought it amusing that the meaning of the word was thought to be beyond the ken of the American reader even when presented with a description and 300 or so pages revolving around the location. However, the blog entry on Sarah’s Bookarama entitled The Americanization of British Novels, reveals that the change to the title of this American edition is only the beginning.

It seems each and every blemish of regional linguistic colour in Rankin’s Scottish prose is excised in a hideous act of editorial plastic surgery, at least in the case of another of his novels, Let it Bleed. Judging by what Sarah writes, the cankerous boil of his deviation from standard US English forms, so hideous upon the face of his fiction, is well and truly lanced with the bright shining monocultural needle of US linguistic imperialism. I do agree with Sarah's comments about the way in which this detracts from the book and its atmosphere. Sadly, someone thinks it sells books; I do hope they're wrong.

A Thesis: Greggs and the demise of dough-based regional variation

barm noun. See also barmcake.
[Origin unkn.]
A large soft bread roll.

barmy adjective. Also balmy.
[Origin unkn.]
2. fig. Excitedly active; empty-headed, daft, crazy. Now slang. L16.

Thanks to those of you who have taken the trouble to comment. It's clear that bread rolls are on your mind. And who could blame you?? In the mornings they envelop egg, surround sausages and beautify bacon. At lunch they reveal their versatility, revelling resplendent under a multitude of cold fillings, and at teatime they bear us burgers and carry our chips. God bless baps! A truly versatile and endearing foodstuff.

Through comments and e-mails, the North-East of Scotland has put "rowies", "softies" and "morning rolls" on the map and I don't doubt that missives from various parts of the north of England concerning "stotties", "barms", "teacakes", "cobs", "batches" and "buns" are, even now, winging their way to me. Reader, I have heard the voice of the people and it cries: "Bring us more about bread!" Being the kind of man who likes to bite off more bap than he can chew, I shall attempt to combine a response to this popular cry with the introduction of a new empirical rigour to my linguistic explorations.

In mentioning H W Fowler in the previous posting, I distanced myself from the prescriptive grammarian. By doing so, I tacitly endorsed the descriptive approach to linguistics, which seeks to record and analyse a language as it is actually spoken and refrains from making value judgements about grammar and vocabulary. As we will no doubt come to see, this fault line is just one of many schisms which divides the warring community of linguists. I should, however, stress that the academic prescriptive linguist is a breed which, if not actually dead, is on life support with a very poor prognosis.

Jean Aitchison describes the modern linguist's approach thus:

...rules are not arbitrary laws imposed by an external authority, but a codification of a subconscious principles or conventions followed by the speakers of a language.

Language Change: progress or decay?, 2nd Ed, CUP, 1991

Codifying these rules and understanding speaker's use of particular words in different geographical locations requires that the linguist listen, record and and describe the language as it is used.

So, we seem to have a lot of regional words for bread rolls. I'm amazed these have survived the age of mass media and global corporations. I certainly can't recall hearing very many of the bread roll synonyms mentioned above on the radio or the TV. I wonder if we used to have even more variety for the bread roll? I'll do some looking into this but, meanwhile, when passing a branch of Greggs the other day I had a moment of epiphany.

Greggs is ubiquitous in the UK, with over 1,000 branches strung out from Inverness to Brighton (and apparently they now have 4 shops in Belgium too). In addition to steak-bakes and sausage rolls, they also sell bread rolls and therefore provide an ideal laboratory for experimentation into bread rolls and regional linguistic variation. Does, I wonder, Greggs impose a corporate name on its bread rolls or does it permit regional variation? If it does impose a corporate word, is this impacting on the use of dialect norms at a local level?

This is an experiment with which I hope you might assist me. All you need to do is to follow the instructions below and let us know your findings in the comments section of this posting. To ensure robust findings I have designed the experiment carefully to be certsom that we hear language used in a natural context. Here are the instructions for the experiment, with explanatory notes in brackets:

Stage A
1. Enter your local branch of Greggs (using the door and during normal opening hours).
2. Attract the attention of a staff member (this can be challenging in a branch of Greggs, but try hard refrain from verbal or physical abuse as this may potentially unsettle the subject).
3. Point towards the bread rolls without speaking and enquire "What are these called?" (make a mental note of the subject's response - neither paper/pen nor sound recording equipment should be used as these may unnerve the subject).
4. Now point at the sausage rolls and ask "What are these called?" (this is known as a "control" question - as far as I am aware there is no recorded regional variation for this pastry-type and the subject should respond by saying "sausage rolls", but if they reply "pastry snake" or "banger-en-filo" or anything else, then I'd like to know!).
5. Leave the shop (devoid of consumer credibility but abuzz with the thrill of linguistic discovery).

Stage B
Repeat steps 1-5 above, but do so at a local independent baker's (responses found here should be again be recorded for comparison to those from a nearby Greggs and analysed for indications of a threat to regional linguistic variation).

Stage C (Control 2)
Repeat steps 1-5, but in a hardware store and pointing at a drill and then a jigsaw (it's important that we have a further "control" which makes certain that you're not mishearing shop staff saying "barm" when they are in fact universally describing you as "barmy").

Who would have thought a bit of empirical experimentation could be such fun? Do let me know of your results and I will be posting news of my own execution of the experiment in due course...

What the 'eck are kecks?

kecks noun pl. slang and dial. L19
[Alt. of kicks]
Trousers, knickers or underpants.

I feel you deserve some sort of explanation concerning the omnipresence of my “Merseyside cousins” in the postings so far. It's a bit of a surprise to me and, on that basis, I’m guessing you didn’t see it coming either. Their constant mention seems to beg a lot of questions and so, for the sake of all involved, it’s probably just best for me to just get it all out the way now...

Mum grew up in Liverpool. Eldest of four in a small terraced council house. Muirhead Avenue, Liverpool 13, in the fifties and sixties. My grandparents still lived in the same house and we’d visit frequently when I was young. The five of us would squeeze into a brown Renault 12 and, clutching presents, traverse the Pennines over the Snake Pass in the snow for the Boxing Day clan gatherings. Mum and I would go in the summer too. The train through the Peak District and then a dash over the footbridge at Piccadilly to make the connection for Lime Street. Sometimes Mum and I might stay two or three weeks at a time.

Gran and Grancha’s place was a riotous cacophony of ornaments, trinkets, chintz, cheap porcelain horses towing miniature drays laden with barrels, brasses, lino and mass-produced iconic homewares of the fifties. Vying for your nostrils’ attention were Old Spice, fry ups, a coal fire, home brew and “The Dog” (first “Whiskey” and then “Brandy”). There was a cat later, but I don’t recall the name. Out back was a small square of grass, a greenhouse, its panes straining to contain burgeoning tomato vines and, next to it, a rosebush encircled by a white-walled tire embedded in the ground.

Auntie Pam and Uncle Pat lived ‘cross the Mersey with cousins Christine, Helen and David. New Brighton and then later in Wallasey Village. David and I were both the youngest of three and he was just six months older than me. Mum and I stayed some of the time at their place in the summers and they’d visit us at half term or at Easter. In short, Mum stayed close to her family, we saw our cousins frequently and they had an accent and vocabulary very different from our own.

David and I were close and spent a lot of time together. Fantastic times skiing at Sheffield’s dry slope and twice with our dads we stayed in a remote cottage on the west coast of Scotland - just the four of us. I can still picture his bedroom at the back of the house in Wallasey Village. A series of mental snapshots from different years: a ZX80 on his desk; nunchucks and a punch bag in the corner where there would later be a shower cubicle; the half light and the hush with the curtains drawn on the morning of Auntie Pam's funeral. We drifted apart after both our mothers succumbed to cancer before we made it out of our teens, but I've fond memories of hedge-hopping, illicit drinking at family dos and football and frisbee in Scotland.

To come back to the point, I remember words as well as images. I’ve already mentioned alleys and butties, but the main one which sticks in my head is “kecks” - what Dave called his trousers and, sometimes, his pants. I like this word. I don’t have a Sheffield alternative to offer or to hold out as the “correct” form. I just called trousers, well... “trousers”. I’m aware that “strides” is used in some places and elsewhere "kicks", but there are surely a host of other words which some kindly soul might tell us about in the comments section?

Two final points. Firstly, I was a little over-zealous in my defence of "gennel" and I should apologise. I wouldn’t want you to think of me as a prescriptive linguist. I love regional variations and the plethora of words English and its dialects gives us. Secondly it would be unforgivable to discuss synonyms for trousers without including the below excerpt from a doyen of the prescriptive grammarians, one Henry Watson Fowler. As is so often the case with prescriptive grammarians, language becomes a battlefield laden with value judgements. Rarely, however is there such wit as this:

...Breeches has returned and, with the help of jodhpurs, plus-fours, shorts and trunks, has ousted knickerbockers which, in its curtailed form knickers, has been appropriated by women. Bloomers was short-lived for cyclists, but survives for schoolgirls; drawers is falling into genteel obsolescence, and even the highly respectable trousers is menaced by slacks and jeans.

A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, 2nd Ed, OUP, 1965

Anyone confused by “grancha” will be relieved to learn that this is a word I’m almost certain to return to along with granddad, granda, gramps nana, nain, gran and the rest…