Anders Hanson

A posting on The Yorksher Gob blog (which I only discovered yesterday thanks to the Campaign for Gender Balance Blog Awards), has made me realise I use another bit of Yorkshire dialect without realising it.

The Yorkshire Gob mentions in the footnote to one posting about the word ’stood’:

stood is a perfectly valid Yorkshire dialect particple of the verb to stand. I would like to see it adopted countrywide over the much more unwieldy standing, but a bit of a forlorn hope.

Well I use “stood” in the same context, and it had never really occured to me that it was gramatically incorrect, and I would consider myself to be someone who largely uses English properly (except when I am writing blog entries quickly and don’t check them properly afterwards).

I can now add “stood” (in the present tense) to words like “pot” (to mean a plaster cast on your arm or leg), “mardy” (to mean someone who is being a bit sulky and angry), “nesh” (to mean a bit feeble and weak - often as a criticism of someone if they are complaining about the weather), “while” (to mean ‘to’, as in ‘we’re open 9 while 5′) and “gennel” (to mean an alleyway), as words that I have always used but that I had never realised were Sheffield dialect until someone pointed it out. I did find out about some of them when I went to university and people didn’t have a clue what I was talking about when I said that someone had a ‘pot on their leg’.

As someone who doesn’t have much of an accent, (although some Southern friends of mine would disagree), I like the fact that I do use some local words. It does at least connect me with my roots and where I grew up.