As I was saying...Yorkshire words of the week

SO MANY of the dialect words and expressions your readers write about have been part of my vocabulary since I was a child. My mother's use of the expression "a wimwam for ducks to peak on" (never a wigwam) was sometimes changed to "a wimwam for a sewing machine". A friend from the South, who has lived in Yorkshire for more than 50 years, tells me her father's version was "a wimwam for a Dutch oven".

The words "progging" and "chumping" for collecting wood for November 5 are not, as far as I know, used in South Yorkshire. Children I taught in Wombwell in 1959 referred to "bunny woodin" and said it meant collecting wood "fer t'bonfire".

Asked what was for tea, my mother would reply "bread and slap it on" which it was in the 1940s: margarine and jam if you were lucky. My daughter's mother-in-law who lives in East Yorkshire says "a jump at the dairy (larder) door".

She refers to the pile of logs, stacked outside for the winter as a "stick hill". I have not heard this expression in the Bradford, Leeds or Barnsley-Wakefield areas, where I have lived.

From: Greta Weightman, Ingswell Avenue, Notton, Wakefield.

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From: Mrs JF Jones, Lyme Brook, Snape, Bedale.

I GREW up on a farm in Nidderdale in the 1930s. Many of the everyday expressions I still use, although they often have to be explained to my grandchildren.

"Neither summat nor nowt" – a matter of no importance. "Put wood in't oil" and "were tha' born in a field?" both meant close the door. "Twined as his/her backside" – bad tempered. "Capt" or "reet capt" – surprised or very surprised. "Mawkes" are maggots. Sheep, ham and even home-made cheese (which sometimes became infested) were said to be "mawked".

From: Judith Kay, Oaks Green Mount, Rastrick, Brighouse.

FURTHER to the correspondents of Country Week, December 12, I remember being called Fanny Fanackapan when I was small, and have called my granddaughter this as she grew up.

I also have a Middlesbrough connection, like Sue Cuthbert, but all I have been able to find out is that a song by Gracie Fields contained a reference to "Fred Fanackapan", and a suggestion that Fanny may have been his sister, but whether either were real people or just made up to fit the rhyme in a set of lyrics is not known.

In Brighouse, if you were "flaid", you were scared, and a persistent irritating soft cough was said to be a "peffy" cough. If a baby was grumbling, but not actually crying hard, my grandmother said it was "nanging".

From the Dales, I have come across "dowly", meaning not very well but not very ill, "nobbut dowly".