Old British dialect words...

[Dave]

It may have a slightly different meaning South of the border as I've only heard it applied to that sticky kind of mud that gardeners know well and which gets everywhere. However, the Internet seems to think it is 'sticky mud mixed with horse manure', which is more in keeping with your 'lack of personal hygiene'.

Geordie and Scots have a lot of words that are clearly Viking in origin. Hyem being Geordie for home, but also the same in Danish. Bairn being a small child in Scots and Northern English, but also the same in old Norse and in Swedish a child is a Barn.

 

[Gramm838]

There are some great Geordie and Scots words that possibly have no direct translation. I particularly like the noun Clarts and adjective Clarty.

Wye aye man, ganning for a plodge in the clarts (going for paddle in the mud, for those of you of a non-Geordie disposition)

There's a great word that is used exclusively in Geordie-land - 'gadje' - which is used to describe someone of advancing years (ie me)...I read somewhere this is a word brought to Britain by the Samartian cavalry in the Roman Army.

And of course there's hyem (home), liggy (a marble)...

 

[Dave]

Gagje is a good word. I haven't heard that origin before.

 

[Ice fyre]

There's a great word that is used exclusively in Geordie-land - 'gadje' -

Gadgje is used here in Scotland, I think it used to denote a sharp customer, a bit of a lad.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

Is it from Romany?

 

[Venusian Broon]

Is it from Romany?

It doesn't say so. Here's a definition of gadge: http://www.dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/gadge_n_v2, leader to gadger which I'm sure I've used. (I can't find a version spelled gadje)

(But just below it on the list on the right there's the term Gadgie where apparently has Romany origins)

 

[Dave]

I certainly thought that a Gadjy (however spelt*) was an older man, a man with some experience, a leader possibly, or a foreman or boss, but maybe a better translation would be an elder?

It does sound like the Romany origin is plausible.

* dialect words are rarely written but mainly spoken. Very few people wrote at all before printing and English words had several possible spellings. So there is nothing odd about different spellings.

 

[Venusian Broon]

I certainly thought that a Gadjy (however spelt*) was an older man, a man with some experience, a leader possibly, or a foreman or boss, but maybe a better translation would be an elder?

It does sound like the Romany origin is plausible.

* dialect words are rarely written but mainly spoken. Very few people wrote at all before printing and English words had several possible spellings. So there is nothing odd about different spellings.

There's a large corpus of old Scots words that would be today called dialect there in literature - you know Rabbie Burns and all that that survived, well, to today really. And there has been a printing industry in Edinburgh for centuries (mostly religious polemics it seems for a lot of the time admitedly), that have thrived on at least partially on the Scottish dialects. I would hazard a guess that there were probably regional centres for printing in England, Wales and Ireland too - but probably the dominance of London and advantages of scale as it was really massive in book publishing could of pushed some of the old local centres out of existence (and hence made the language perhaps more uniform?). But I'm speculating.