The vorlus snorlus world of local words and phrases
» DID you play kingy at school? If you were making arrangements to meet someone did you say “See you safty”? And after you’d met a friend was your parting word “Tadah”?
If you answered yes to any or all of the above, you almost certainly grew up in Gloucestershire and probably in the 1950s/60s. For those who didn’t, kingy was the local word for ball tag. Safty meant this afternoon. And tadah was goodbye.
Tewkesbury born writer John Moore recalled in his delightful memoir The Blue Field a term familiar in the town that had been in currency since the time of Shakespeare.
“We have a word which schoolboys use for the crackly dry stems of the hemlock and the hedge parsley, kecksies, a local word which is heard, I think, nowhere else in England, but Shakespeare puts it into the mouth of the Duke of Burgundy in Henry the fifth.
“Nothing teems, but hateful docks, rough thistles, kecksies, burs.”
Many of the words and phrases that Gloucestershire claimed its own have fallen from use in the past half century or so. But listen out and you’ll still catch the odd “Hello me old butt” in the Forest, along with a “Wur bist that to?” Dursen, meaning dare not (as in “He dursen do that”) is a leftover from long ago still to be encountered, though sadly the occasions when someone is described as “vorlus snorlus” (unpredictable in behaviour) is well past its sell-by date.
Victorian parsons were intrigued by the Gloucestershire vocabulary and a number, most notably the Rev Richard Huntley made a detailed study of the subject while he was incumbent at Boxwell parish church. It’s on the right if you’re driving along the A46 from Nailsworth in the direction of Little Sodbury.
Unfortunately the good Rev died before the fruits of his extensive labours were published.
But we can thank him for such gems as a yuckel being the name for a green woodpecker. Staying with birds, a fieldfare was called a veldwer. You might have thought that yuck came into currency via the Beano, or perhaps Walt Disney cartoons. But according to Richard Huntey his parishioners were using it as a term of distaste long before comics or movies.
Some words were specific to a place. In Stow-on-the-wold, for instance, a mawsey was a turnip that was past its freshest and gone spongy.
A manajery had nothing to do with a zoo, or animals but referred to a contrivance, while if a person were said to be maggoty they had their head in the clouds and were awash with whimsy.
As recently as the 1970s born and bred folk from Woodmancote, near Bishop’s Cleeve would ask on the occasion of a birth “Is it a boy, or is it a child?”
In these non gender specific politically correct times of course this would translate simply as “Is it a they?”, which falls less pleasingly on the ear.
Apparently liquorice was used to describe anything that tasted sweet, but lush had nothing to do with the flavour of anything. If you were lushing you had the bough from a tree in your hand and were beating a wasp nest. Why you would want to do that isn’t made clear.
An uppish person was wildly enthusiastic, an upping block helped a rider mount their horse and an urchin was a hedgehog. Someone careering hither and yon was a vandyke. Vlobber meant talking rubbish, vissuck to fumble and in the Forest of Dean a vern was your butt (partner) in a drift (mine).
One final snippet. Lode, or lodes as a suffix, is used to denote places that were crossing points on the River Severn, such as Wainlodes, Lower Lode and Framilode. It’s a reminder that St Mary De Lode church in Gloucester once stood adjacent to a ferry that operated from the west side of the church, which crossed a now vanished third course of the Severn.
With that, tadah.