Yorkshire Words Of The Week

From John Senior, Birchfield Grove, Skelmanthorpe.

I was puzzled by Linda Revis’s letter last week until I realized that if I pronounced her “car” more like “care” then I fully recognised the word.

The way I pronounce it would be similar to a farmer saying that he was going to “fetch his cares in for milking”.

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The reason they both sound similar is that they both come from words containing cow, namely cower and cows.

If you look up cower in a modern dictionary it defines it as to ‘crouch down in fear’. In Barclays Dictionary, published in 1808, there is no mention of fear; it defines cower as to “stoop by bending the knees”. All this reminded me of the 1950s when ,if you passed the “Grove Corner” in Skelmanthorpe in the early afternoon, you would see a group of miners with their “snap” tins and bottles of “cowd tee-ah” waiting for the pit bus to take them for their afternoon shift at Emley Moor colliery.

Instead of standing, most of them would be “cared day-an”’ on the “causey” with their backs against the wall of the Grove Inn.

They would be used to this posture as I am told that the seams at Emley Moor were thin and the coal hand-hewn.

From: Ray Mount, Far Banks, Honley,

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The pronunciation of “car” in the Holme Valley would be “caire”, meaning to rest, wait and shelter, as in, “I caired under t’wall till rain stopped”. “Weather breeding”, which Majorie Manley inquired about last week, is the foretelling of bad weather.

From: Stan Parker, Ramsey Road, Middlestown, Wakefield.

READERS’ comments over the old fashioned saying ‘leet geen’ has often made me smile.

Mr Quarmby and Mr Atkinson had both come up with the correct meaning. Both men live in the Pennines. Living on the edge of the Pennines, near the mining museum, I grew up with this saying. It was an everyday expression and everyone knew the meaning. I can’t remember anyone at the time using a different one.

“Leet geen” means lightly given and it applied to both sexes.

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If it was a woman they just said: “she’s leet geen” and if it was a man, the favourite expression was: “he’s as leet geen as a billy goat.”

The words went out of fashion in our area in the 1970s when a new word replaced it.

The word was “easy” which has now been replaced by the word “slapper”, although these two words refer to the fairer sex.

The dictionary defines it by the word “promiscuous”.’

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