Hewitt's History Files
IF someone told you they'd just seen a 'crummy curious culver being chased by a cutty', would you have the vaguest idea what they were on about?
All are words culled from just one page of a 19th- century dictionary of Sussex dialect. Not that it makes particular sense, but they would have just told you that they'd seen a wren purusing a fat drunk dove.
But the point is that these are words that few Sussex people would recognise today – words seemingly once common in the county.
Words which the Rev W D Parish, vicar of Selmeston (pronounced 'Simpson'), collected and compiled into a volume that has now been dusted off and reprinted.
In between 1875, when it was first published, and now, we've a century and a third that has done huge and irreversible damage to dialect the length and breadth of the country.
For full feature see West Sussex Gazette April 30
The full article contains 158 words and appears in n/a newspaper.
-
Last Updated:
28 April 2008 3:34 PM
-
Source:
n/a
-
Location:
Chichester
