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...

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.