The Delights of Local Dialect.

For some reason last night I kept hearing the phrase ‘a lady on a milk white steed’ running through my head. It sounds poetic, doesn’t it? Sounds as though it should be at the heart of a new ditty. So did I construct a new ditty around it? No, instead I was reminded of the dialect that used to be spoken in my neck of the woods when I was a boy.

One of its oddities was the carrying of a consonant at the end of a word onto the start of a second word if it began with a vowel. So a white horse became ‘a way toss.’ And if you asked the question of a person steeped in the diction of the industrial Potteries what on earth a ‘way toss’ was, he or she would probably answer: ‘It’s the same as a bry noss, only wait.’

Unfortunately it’s mostly gone now. The modern speaker will call a white horse ‘a why torse,’ and a brown horse ‘a brow norse’ which makes communication a lot easier.