Take a linguistic tour a holus-bolus fidge-fadge, if you will around some of Britain’s most charming forgotten words

When I examined the wonderful collection of glossaries of county dialects I realised just how monastic was the zeal with which the Victorian lexicographers went about their compiling. Just as they collected the rocks, butterflies and ancient antiquities that now fill our museums, so (predominantly between 1850 and 1880) they went around collecting examples of local dialect from every county in England and several in Scotland and even some specific industrial communities such as the mining villages of Yorkshire and Durham.

I learned much about the British character through the English language. One of the more interesting aspects of English is the love of identifying action and sound through semi-onomatopoeic phrases. These jolly, affectionate and inventive expressions are known in the linguistics community as "reduplicative rhyming compounds".

Mind your language | The Guardian http://ift.tt/1dQYBWy