Snickelways, Twitchels, Wynds, etc., Anglophile Friday

Durham

I happened upon this photo that I took in Durham last spring, and wanted to make sure to label it correctly. After all, one can't simply call it a 'walkway,' for that's just too easy, it seems, and much less interesting. Evidently, in different parts of Britain, these narrow walkways or alleyways between two buildings have different names. And I'm never certain how to pronounce British words, for the pronunciation is often not at all intuitive and sometimes a total surprise...to an American, at least. This is why we have Google.

Anyway...

I found an interesting article on a website associated with the Oxford English Dictionary (which sadly gave us 'Buttdial,' 'Awesomesauce,' etc. - check Wednesday's Hodgepodge. Right. I never thought the Oxford English Dictionary would stoop so low, butt...).

**Oxford Dictionaries Blog is the source for the article, which I've copied here, but the bold is mine - to make it easier to find the most relevant bits, for those of you in a hurry.

 Durham

Durham

From blog.oxforddictionaries.com:

"It is striking just how many words seem to exist to denote this single, relatively specific, concept. A few (like alleyway, passage, and path) are used nationwide, but a plethora of more unusual words also seem to fit this slot in speakers’ vocabulary, and many of them have a distinctively regional distribution. Informants from the north west of England speak up in favour of the snicket, a noun of uncertain origin first recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) in a Victorian glossary of the dialect of the Lake District. Another term, ginnel, is also widely used in Greater Manchester and parts of Yorkshire.

Some speakers use both ginnel and snicket, but for different kinds of passageway, reserving one term for a short, narrow covered passage between two houses and the other for a typically longer, wider, walkway running between two streets; although even here, there is disagreement about which is which. To confuse matters further, in 1983, Mark W. Jones ingeniously blended the two in the title of his book A Walk Around the Snickelways of York, and though the city’s tourist industry has been quick to take advantage of the marketing potential of his picturesque portmanteau, it has yet to make significant inroads into the speech of locals.

York
And all this time I thought it was a snickelway.

York
The Abominable Snowman

York

"Even for a single item of vocabulary, it is surprising how much variation can exist. In parts of Manchester and Derbyshire the variant gennel is preferred to ginnel, and while some prescribe a pronunciation with hard G (as in get) and a spelling guinnel, others insist on an initial affricate (as in jet), and a spelling jennell. In Warwickshire, Coventry, and parts of Leicestershire, an alleyway was often called a jetty or jitty: the word is reflected in the name of several streets in Rugby and Northampton. Around this area and further to the north-west, the term entry is also used, especially of the covered passageway in a row of terraced houses used to access the back yard (the Scouse word ennog seems to be a playful alteration of this). And so it goes on across the country. From the jiggers of Liverpool to the pends of Dundee, the ten-foots of Hull to the lanes and closes of Edinburgh, diversity is the order of the day.

 

 London

"In parts of Scotland and Ireland, a narrow alley is not a gennel but a vennel, a word which was also once used in Northumberland for a conduit or open sewer: this seems to be a 15^th-century borrowing of a medieval French word for an alley, venelle (or venele), ultimately a diminutive of the Latin word for “vein”. Similar semantic motivation seems to lie behind the use of gully (or gulley) as a word for a passageway in parts of the Black Country and Wales. Wherever you live, it seems, an alley can be a damp and smelly place.

 London

"The east Midlands was the heartland of the twitchel: the word’s connection with this area seems to go back at least to the 15^th century, when it is recorded in Nottingham. Twitchel seems ultimately to be a variant (with a different suffix) of the Old English word twicen, a word used in Anglo-Saxon charters for a place where two roads meet which may be related to twitten, the local word for an alleyway in Sussex.

 London

 London

"In County Durham and Newcastle-on-Tyne, a narrow passageway is often called a chare—the word survives in the names of a number of streets in the area and is first recorded in the 13^th century in the name of Potter’s Chare, a former street in Gateshead. This term is thought to derive from the Old English word cierr “turning”, and so has a semantic parallel in another alleyway word, wynd, used in the same area and in Scotland."

 London

 Much Wenlock

And now that you're thoroughly confused, there're also the nouns (yes, nouns, not verbs) 'close' and 'shut,' which also seem to mean the passageway between two streets or buildings.

Okay, friends, I better wynd this up.

Hope you have a wonderful weekend!

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And I couldn't resist sharing this one with you:

The wee granddaughter

Left: Dressed up for the wedding

Right: Enjoying cranberry sauce

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This post will perhaps be linked to
Mosaic Monday

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