By way of explanation...

bap /bap/ noun. L16
[Origin unkn.]
A large soft bread roll.

dap /dap/ noun. E20
[Origin unkn.]
3. A rubber-soled shoe; a sports shoe, a plimsoll. slang.

The word might have first been used in the late sixteenth century but, as far as I was concerned, "Fletchers' baps" came cellophane-wrapped in sets of four. If they don't still, they certainly did in the seventies and eighties when I was growing up in Sheffield. "Daps" might sound almost the same, but there the similarity ends. These were not cellophane wrapped and were, in fact, what my Dad (brought up in Wales) called the requisite non-marking footwear for his Wednesday night games of badminton at the University's Goodwin Sports Centre. "Daps" however, was an alien language to my friends and I. These rubber-soled indoor sports shoes might either be laced or elasticated slip-ons, but they were quite definitely "plimsolls" or "pumps".

Similarly, when we visited my cousins in the Wirral, our "baps" (I'm sure Fletchers will forgive my affectionate appropriation of their bread products just this once) were called "butties". Admittedly, in South Yorkshire you can fill a bap with chips and call it a "buttie" (try it when you're there next), but everyone knows that, underneath that makeshift camouflage of chips, there lurks a plain old bap the same as any other. Contrary to this well understood convention, my cousins would brazenly talk of having "butties for lunch" when these contained only ham or cheese (sometimes both) and there was not a deep-fried, thick-cut potato in sight. Alas, my shrill and insistent attempts to correct them went unheeded and these poor souls, and many like them, labour under this Merseyside misunderstanding to this day.

So, with these two words of my childhood lies the origin of these musings. I became intrigued by such synonyms and what I know now to be "lexical" or "dialectal" variations (I looked in a fancy book). Amongst the peoples of the British Isles this plethora of possibilities for describing what are essentially the same thing is, it seems, most common in the words we use to describe the mundane objects of the everyday: footwear; bread; the narrow pathways between buildings. As such, the individual trying to ask a stranger in another part of the country directions in order to buy shoes and some bread products takes his or her life in their hands.

Although it has been rumoured that I studied English Language and Literature at University, I never learned about these variations, which sometimes seem to occur within just 20 or 30 miles of one another. What lies behind them? How did they come about? Are new such words still coming into being? How have they managed to persist under what I imagine somebody clutching a copy of The Daily Mail would term "the assault" of the mass media? Does anyone really care? Is anybody else at all even remotely interested in this topic? Am I going to get anywhere with my investigations or should I just slip on my daps right now, and pad quietly down the nearest gennel, taking a tasty bap with me for sustenance?

These questions and more besides could be answered in the postings to this blog, but I suspect that they probably won't. If, however, you have an unusual local word, an amusing tale of regional linguistic confusion resulting in uninvited violence, an illegitimate birth or the unexpected loan of some aging but functional long-handled shears, please get in touch. Really, please get in touch! I've got one or two things up my sleeve but, to be honest, my material's really a bit limited, so go ahead and comment or my journey from baps to daps will be all too fleeting.