Let’s go a Rambling in the English Language and the way it is spelt. It can be complicated for instance … The soldier decided to desert his desert post in the desert … or about … he thought there was no time like the present to present the present to his girlfriend … to make it more confusing words are totally muddled by local lingos.
Some accents and sayings, let as go to Yorkshire ‘Sit hef’ meaning goodbye nice to meet you or for food ‘Scran’. In Bristol they tend to add an ‘L’ to the end of words, so a Ford Cortina sounds like Cortinal. Northern Ireland my friend Karen will not mind me borrowing her saying of her home as ‘Norn Iron’, there are many more in all walks of life, and they can make understanding difficult.
Before the days of Satellites, Google and the Internet, a comfortable time when life moved at a much slower pace, we had recently moved to our new home city Bath. One evening we met two people from the Caribbean. They were tall, a well-groomed couple for people from that part of the world, although their clothing was very old fashioned.
I’ll explain more about them in a minute!
In East London resides the Cockney World of my upbringing where in normal speech words are used with a rhyming slang, for instance the most notable is instead of stairs, apple and pears is used and normally shortened even further in speech to just apples.
There are many more used in everyday language without a thought, ‘Bread’ meaning money as it is reduced from ‘Bread & Honey’. Very confusing for those not in the know. There are many, many more used without thought including ‘dentist job’ when someone pours out their own drink referring to a dentist pulling one tooth at a time.
Cockneys tend to be very funny people, short, clipped sayings with a grin on their face turning a nasty problem into a humorous situation and yet at the same time being very serious about resolving it.
This story is about an overcast evening in Weston on the outskirts of Bath in Somerset, I was undertaking an endorsement for a holiday company promoting the Caribbean, the couple I just mentioned were not expected however, they joined the audience.
At that time my dear lady partner and wife Jean was justly recognised in the financial world through her employment where she was proficient, in later years after her retirement Jean was frequently asked to sort out problems on accounts at a time when the organisation was changing to computer control.
I don’t know if it was contrived, nevertheless, at the time we did not think anything of it. But the couple chatted with us about their homeland and then invited us to dinner a few days later.
Although it was late in the year it was a lovely evening warmer than previous. There were no parking metres where we needed to be when we drove the eight miles into Bath, parking by the kerb in the centre and meeting the Caribbean couple at one of the city’s charming restaurants. They were the only people of colour; other patrons would stare and look our way.
After the normal greeting they explained who they were and their authority as they were from the Caribbean Government. Which led them to tell us why they were in Britain. They were looking for a couple to take charge of the Treasury in their country, they had put us in the frame for the work.
© Percy Chattey
