Ten words on the brink of extinction

Podcast stars are putting their voices behind a new campaign to get more people talking about “blatherskites”, “mardy bums” and other regional words.

Show hosts will each “adopt” one of 25 words or phrases identified as being “on the brink of extinction” by the British Library following analysis of regional papers and social media posts, reported The Guardian. The campaign to “breathe life back into such threatened dialect words” is being spearheaded by Steady, an independent platform behind a network of podcasts.

Regional radio broadcasters are also being urged to join podcasts including The Lost Tapes of History and Black History Buff in picking a word from the “endangered” list, and to then “talk about or weave it into their speech during a show”, said The Times.

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Campaign adviser Jonnie Robinson, the British Library’s lead curator for Spoken English, argued that provincial words are “part of group bonding and our sense of identity”. Robinson believes such words can be brought into the mainstream and “pointed out that the Sheffield phrase ‘mardy bum’ – a description of a moody grumbler used by D.H. Lawrence – had been the title of a hit song by Arctic Monkeys”, the paper added.

Here are ten other words on the must-save list:

Blatherskite: a term from Durham meaning a gossip

Old Dutch: a colloquialism for a wife or female partner, Old Dutch is a shortened version of “duchess” that has been traced back to around 1720

Flenched: an old Scottish term to describe weather that promises to improve but never actually does

Scrammed-up: another weather-related term, this is how someone from Devon might describe being very cold

Paddocked: a Lancashire term for being thirsty

Kelt: coined in Lancashire in the early 1600s, kelt means money

Hoddy-dods: an Essex expression for snails

Forby: another term chiefly used in Scotland, meaning “besides”, “not to mention” or “as well as”

Beggared: in use in Shropshire since around 1730, beggared is another way of saying exhausted

Slithag: originating on the Isle of Man, a slithag is simply a slice of bread.