Ian McMillan: Utopia! If you frame thissen properly, that is

I was pondering this the other Friday when I saw a bloke telling his grandson off on Wombwell High Street, somewhere between the cash

machine queue and the slipper stall. I'd been thinking about visiting that cafe in Buckden, featured in the Yorkshire Post recently, where they try to get the clientele to order their tea and cakes in Broad Yorkshire. I had language on my mind, and I was all ears and open to local words.

The lad in question was being told off because he was dragging his

feet, not wanting to be in Wombwell's Central Business District at all, wishing he was at home. The grandad was exasperated and sweat was

cascading down his brow from beneath the neb of his cap and he

eventually shouted: "Come on, clarteead, frame thissen serrie!" The lad reluctantly framed himself and came on.

What the man said wasn't just an example of extreme Barnsley dialect, or Deep Tarn as linguists call it: it was a way of thinking that, as regional variations of English mutate or melt away, will fossilise. Clarteead refers of course to a kind of nail, a nail with a particular flat head, a nail that (I'm speculating here) was in common use down the pit and the man who used the term was used to banging one with a hammer, and used to using it as a term of friendly abuse to his apprentices and those around him. It was a clout nail; a nail you clouted.

The point here is that clarteead is more specific than idiot, more

rooted in place and time than fool. I, as a middle-aged man, understood the use of claartead, but the young lad didn't. His granddad may as

well have been speaking Walloon. When the word dies, then the memory of a way of life will go as well. When a word isn't spoken any more then the roots of that word wither away.

Frame thissen is an unusual phrase. I've heard it so many times over my life that I never thought of it as dialect until I edited a dialect

dictionary a few years ago and somebody pointed out to me that people in Ely or Padstow might not use it often.

In general terms, it means "come on, buck up, sort your ideas out" but I think that, in specific terms, it's another mining word. Some people have speculated that it's about the idea that if you stand too long

you'll be like a picture in a frame, but I reckon that's too picturesque. It must refer to something they did on or near the coal face. Again, once the generation that uses it every day goes, then the phrase itself will fall down a hole, never to be heard again.

Serrie is a fantastic word that my father-in-law's generation used to

use a lot; the uninitiated think it means sithee as in "look here, my good man" but it's a lot more exciting than that. It's a variation on the word Sirrah and it means Sir. As the perspiring man on Wombwell

High Street said, the word hung in the air. In its two syllables there's a direct line to a pre-industrial age, an age probably before framing and cloutnails, an era when people first arrived in Yorkshire from all over the country because they heard that coal had been found and they all called each other serrie.

I remember once walking down the field to where Houghton Main pit used to be with an old councillor called Jim. We stood talking about

politics at a patch of grass where he swore that you used to be able to

hear the miners talking because the seam was so near the surface.

A man called George walked by with a miserable-looking dog and Jim

raised his fist in the air and said: "Utopia, serrie!"

George raised his fist in the air and said: "Utopia, serrie!" The dog

just looked glum. Here were people sure of their place in the world,

using language and cultural references that they both understood, speaking a language they thought would last forever, like that man in that Siberian forest did just before he keeled over and breathed his last.

So my resolution this week is to help the language: to use the word

serrie at least once a day; that way I'll breathe life back into it and keep Yorkshire Dialect vital. Utopia! Of a linguistic kind...