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...