Hilary Mantel: nesh

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hilary Mantel. Photograph: Sarah Lee

How dost? I miss thee and thou and the verb forms that went with them. And ask myself, why schlep when you can traipse? I miss the suggestion of great effort from the schoolchildren I met in Botswana: “I was walking by my feet.” If you met someone with a truck, you would then ask neatly, “Can you lift me?” Only recently I learned nesh, which you would be after traipsing: fragile, a bit ill, feeling the cold, generally sorry for yourself. Mard was what nesh children were, when I grew up in North Derbyshire, and they probably persist in whining to this day, especially if starved through (feeling chilled). I am pleased that in Devon, in a warmer climate, a little girl is still a little maid.

Andrew O’Hagan: clart

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Andrew O’ Hagan. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod

Like Peppa Pig or regulars at Glastonbury festival, I like muddy puddles. But in my younger days, mud was called clabber or clart – much livelier words – and if you came home wearing the field or with a fondness for new swear words, you’d be called clarty. Maybe I just don’t know enough kids who play football on Saturday mornings, but I rarely see children as muddy as we used to be. (Maybe they’re inside playing Mudslide 4.) Words for mud are among the best in the language and many of them are no longer in use, but surely the wish to invoke mud has not disappeared along with the wish to roll about in it. The British used to have many words for mud: there was slub and plash – in which you can hear the slap and squelch of the substance itself – and blash or stabble. Each referred to a different consistency of mud, as if the speaker could feel the reality of it pressing against his boots. Snelt is the kind of mud that has snow in it, so it would be frozen and smeared on the surrounding white. The Ulster-Scots word glaur conveys a notion of the heaviness and stickiness of wet mud. I think a poet could have all the fun in the world plashing around in the words for mud. And somewhere along the way they might discover the happy Suffolk word for mud that contains manure – durg. Forgotten words are not only a way back to childhood but a way towards future gladness. I need a word for the kind of mud that pours over the tops of your Wellingtons. Sleech?

Will Self: pipe down!

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Will Self. Photograph: Alamy

I remember with great affection my father’s idiolect, which, since he’d been born in 1918, included a number of interwar slang expressions that are long departed from the common lexicon. He once asked me if I was “going to buy some dancing pumps” – I couldn’t stop laughing for a week. He often spoke of things giving him the pip or even the more politically incorrect gyp; he and my uncle referred to one another affectionately as “Batface”, and on those occasions – which were frequent – when I became hysterical, he’d admonish me “not to play the giddy ox”. If I failed he would snap at me to “Pipe down!” – although he was a markedly phlegmatic man himself, and one who often spoke of others possessing such attributes as zip, jizz and vim. All these are not exactly recondite terms – if seldom employed – but one word my father used a lot I’ve never been able to track down. He referred to a small canvas rucksack he habitually carried (one with a single strap that he slung over his shoulder), as his sacheverell – at least I assume it was spelt like Sacheverell Sitwell’s first name, but I never saw him write it down, and unfortunately he died before I could ascertain the origin of this bizarre ascription – it may be it was his private word entirely, and perhaps related to some incident that had occurred involving him and Edith Sitwell’s brother.

Emma Healey: clot

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Emma Healey. Photograph: Katherine Anne Rose

I love the word clot, meaning a solid mass, or lump, especially a lump formed by coagulation. Apart from anything else, it is a really satisfying word to say and is almost onomatopoeic, as the “cl” sound causes a kind of clotting of the tongue against the roof of the mouth. Try these out loud: clotted, clottered (an archaic form used by Chaucer as well as in Chapman’s translation of Homer), clotpate and clot-pole (a clown or dunce, the latter used by Shakespeare in Cymbeline, and Troilus and Cressida), clottiness (which, according to the author of Lorna Doone, has something to do with gravy). It is a changeable ambiguous word, the meaning of which is easy to shift. From Old English, and related to clod, which has earthy connotations, it turns into cluttered in the domestic sphere, a warm, homely word conjuring images of Victorian parlours. Put it in the context of the body though, of blood, and there is an immediate hint of violence or death, of clotting blood, or conversely, dangerously, of blood that refuses to clot. To call someone a clot seems rather a mild insult now, but who wants to be defamed as thick-headed? Clots can be disgusting (think of milk left out of the fridge) or delicious (what could be nicer than clotted cream and scones and jam?). But, as my grandmother said, beware the glottal stop! Clotted has to be pronounced carefully. As proof of this, an American friend of mine went to a supermarket in London recently, asking for clotted cream it took a ridiculously long time to find what she wanted because she couldn’t be understood: “What’s cladded cream?” the staff kept asking.

Eimear McBride: yoke

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Eimear McBride. Photograph: Teri Pengilley

Yoke is a great word so I think I’ll claim it for the west of Ireland, although that may not be completely true. Rather than a wooden bar used to hitch two, or more, oxen together for the purposes of pulling a load or vehicle, the Irish yoke is a term of indeterminate identification applicable to any and all objects or people, which means it means “thing”, as in “Gimme that yoke, would ya?” or “Leave your bike, we’ll take my yoke instead” or “What’s that weird looking yoke on your chest?” Its showier cousins yokeymabob, yokeymajig and yokeybus can be applied in much the same fashion. However, yoke and yokeybus, when attached to people – which yokemabob and yokemajig should never be – carry slight intimations of obstinacy; I have fond memories of being described as a Divil of a yokeybus by an elderly neighbour when I was a small child. “He’s an awful yoke, that one” might be a less colourful sounding example. When applied to grown women, yoke’s slang synonym is probably wagon, which is used to describe any manner of awkward or disagreeable female: intransigent ex‑wife; equal-rights campaigner; pro‑choice advocate and so on.

I also like the word langer, which I picked up while living in Cork. According to the internet, it was brought back from India by the Munster Fusiliers and refers to the langur monkey. To be a langer is to be a bit of dick, while to be langered means to be drunk, which, with its soft “g”, seems to possess just the right amount of kneelessness to perfectly express the state itself. Somewhat unsurprisingly, langer means penis, too.

Neel Mukherjee: tight slap

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Neel Mukherjee. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Guardian

Because I heard the term a tight slap (or often in the plural, such as two tight slaps) first used by Anglo-Indian teachers in the Jesuit school I went to, I have always assumed that it is Anglo-Indian in origin. (By “Anglo-Indian” I mean the people descended from intermarriage between the English and the (native) Indians, a class of people who thought themselves far above the black natives but who were looked down on by the whites.) Anglo-Indians had their own vocabulary, not a million miles from some of the entries in Hobson-Jobson, so I had always thought of the term as belonging to the same class of words as chokra-boy (a young male servant or ne’er-do-well), and baba-log (the word Anglo-Indians used of their children when talking to their nannies).

Every English-speaking person from the Indian subcontinent understands what a tight slap means; most of us have had the unpleasant experience of being on the receiving end of several. I can have a stab at trying to explain what it means, or what I think it means. A tight slap is when the hitting palm makes full and satisfying contact with the cheek being hit. No slippage resulting from the face being turned away or trying to dodge, none of the unsatisfactory business of only the fingers making contact instead of the entire hitting palm; full connectivity, in other words. Before you condemn this out of milky liberal principles, imagine your hand and Grant Shapps’s face. Much better, right?

Robert Macfarlane: apophany

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Robert MacFarlane. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Guardian

I first encountered the word apophenia a decade or so ago – and now I seem to see it everywhere. Its coiner, the psychiatrist Klaus Conrad, used it to mean the unmotivated perception of connections between entities or data, or what he neatly called “abnormal meaningfulness”. Our giving of names and forms to the constellations (Orion, Capricorn, Leo) is a form of apophenia. And an apophany, then, would be the sudden paranoid ascription of relation to discrete phenomena; in contrast to the more familiar epiphany, a moment of piercing insight into the nature of “true” relations.

When apophenia is getting the better of me, I turn to the sturdy pragmatisms of the Shetlandic poet James Stout Angus’s Glossary of the Shetland Dialect (1914). Among its lexical riches is the verb to humbel, which Stout Angus defines as “to reduce protruberant parts, as driftwood is humbeled by striking against the rocks, or as the beard of corn is knocked off by … thrashing with a flail”. When faced with a knotty problem, an overwritten sentence, or indeed a spiky piece of driftwood – I do my best to humbel it.

Taiye Selasi: chale

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Taiye Selasi. Photograph: Nancy Crampton

One of my favourite words is the famous Ghanaian colloquialism, chale. As a delicious piece of vernacular, the word has various spellings: challey, charle, charlie. The pronunciation is more or less “chah-lay”, with equal emphasis on both syllables. The venerable online Urban Dictionary tells us that it is used “in the same sense as the words ‘Dude’ or ‘Homie’”. Another site likens it to old chap in the UK, amigo in Mexico, bredrin in Jamaica. For me it is the sound of coming home. My mother has lived in Accra for almost 15 years; I’ve been visiting at Christmas for 20. I can think of no word more frequently heard in Accra than chale. Like all speakers of tonal languages, Ghanaians can invest infinite meanings in single sounds. “Ey, chale” can be a cheerful greeting, “Chale! We’re waiting” an admonition, “Chale, o” an expression of sympathy, “Chale, I’m tired” a request for the same.

Perhaps it’s the sound as much as the meaning(s) that endears me to the word. I’ve always loved words that begin with the letters “ch”. To my ears, there is something, well, cheerful about the sound. Charming, chocolate, chitchat, children. A touch of mischief, playfulness. The softness of the sound of “sh” with a bit more force, more vigour. There is a reason these letters were added to the word “yeah” to create what our friends at Urban Dictionary call “an exclamatory statement of unexplained joy” (chyeah!). Chale bursts from the lips with the same vigour as chyeah, only to resolve gently in the “le” sound.

And there is the history: the story of how chale came to Ghana, a comment on the flexibility, the absorbency of culture. In the 1940s, Ghana, still under British rule, sent troops to fight in the second world war; the allies’ West African Division fought in Burma against the Japanese. Meanwhile, a number of American soldiers were stationed in Accra, where they used the term Charlie often in their radio broadcasts. The story goes: Ghanaian soldiers at the American base adopted – and adapted – the term, turning Charlie into chale. In a sense, this process of adoption and adaptation – this history of encounter, willing and otherwise – informs my very identity. I like to think that chale and I come from the same place: a West Africa shaping the world in its image, not the other way round.

Sarah Hall: gloaming

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sarah Hall. Photograph: Si Barber

It has been noted how many words describing light begin with “gl”: glimmer; glint; glow; glare etc. One of my favourites is the Cumbrian word glisky, meaning a kind of bright flashing light that you get after it has rained, when all the surfaces are wet and reflecting. I love the particular and sometimes location-specific quality of such words describing nature. Another underused but very lovely “gl” light-related word is gloaming. The gloaming is defined as the period of time after sunset and before darkness – dusk, or twilight. It is rather vague and therefore quite accommodating, and has a sense of almost being a place as well as state. Not only is it a gorgeous word for the mouth to shape and sound out, but it conjures all kinds of hazardous historical excitement before the exposure of street lighting and iPhone torches – bandits on the highway, yellow-eyed long-clawed creatures stalking their prey, and, of course, lyrical lovers roamin’ in the illicit murk. It all goes on in the gloaming.

Nick Laird: thrawn

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nick Laird. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe for the Guardian

If you’re from elsewhere (in my case, County Tyrone) and move to the south of England (as I did, to attend university), you might be surprised to find – like Molière’s Monsieur Jourdain, who learns he has been speaking prose his whole life – that what you talk is actually “dialect”. It is an alienating process – certain locutions and words that you’d always spoken naturally suddenly involve a sense of performance, a self-consciousness, and either you choose to use them, and become “characterful” to the English listener, like one of Shakespeare’s comic turns, or you trim your spoken language accordingly and revert to your first speech only with family and school friends.

One problem is “standard” English is dull in comparison: the Ulster dialect is very good at certain things; drunkenness (stocious, half-tore, half-cut, blootered, lashed), violence and threat (a leathering, a lacing, an oilin, shut your bake, keep your neb out), landscape (gullion, clabber, sheugh), insults (gype, mingin, cipher), insects (clegs, midges, moolies) … Off the top of my head, the words I’m saddest to lose from the tip of my tongue are thrawn (stubborn), thole (bear, put up with), fornenst (opposite), lock (some), cowp (tip over), foreby (besides, as well as), hoke (to rummage), scundered (fed up, disgusted), bap (head), boke (vomit) and hardy (tough, able). The last word in praise from my grandmother, who lived alone on her dairy farm in Armagh until she was 91, was to be called a hardy boy. The final test, the real trial, was “when hardy comes to hardy”, which my mother still says. The word I use subconsciously all the time (as does most of Ulster, and Scotland), and which the English call dialect, is not quite a word but more an interjection halfway between language and breath: och (from the Gaelic ochanaigh – sighing). It signifies anything from frustration to anger to grief. With that kind of range you can see why it’s handy.

Aminatta Forna: plitter

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Aminatta Forna. Photograph by Linda Nylind for the Guardian

My great grandmother was an Orcadian and I am told she spoke to me only Orkney when I was a child. According to my mother, I appeared to understand every word she said and spoke to her in Orkney, too. This strikes me as highly likely, in the way that children appear to be born multilingual, to have by an early age acquired a facility in all the languages of the world and in which they are able to make their needs known. Our family on my grandfather’s side came mainly from Aberdeen and spoke Doric. My grandmother, I’m guessing, spoke both Doric and Orkney. I love the Orkney word clart which I expect I heard a good bit. It means covered in or layered, thick with. You might equally say “that child is clart in mud”, as describe a scone as “clart with jam”. Nareabouts means nearly there or nearly finished. I’m nareabouts done cooking. But best of all is plitter, the most delightful onomatopoeic of words. Plitter: to play about in water, to make a watery mess. I expect I plittered in the paddling pool at Duthie Park and refused to get out even when my great grandmother called: “Stop plittering and come here!” Seemingly an amalgam of play, water and fritter, plitter says it all so effortlessly.

Paul Muldoon: slipe

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Paul Muldoon. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Guardian

A feature of my childhood in the muddy fields of north Armagh and south Tyrone was the slipe, a rudimentary vehicle that is defined by the OED as “a sledge or drag”. Drawn by a tractor, or a horse on hilly ground, the slipe was so rough and ready that to describe it at all is to risk saying too much. For this was a mere plank, not much better than a log, used to transport stones, or bear a plow transversely across furrows. Even then I loved its absurd simplicity, its very basic ambition to have things go smoothly. I hadn’t realised until the other day, as I schlepped a bag of books from New Jersey to New York, that the Yiddish term schlep and the northern dialect term slipe go back to the very same Low German root.

Tessa Hadley: cochineal

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tessa Hadley. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe for the Guardian

One of the words I like is a word of repudiation – I hope that isn’t telling. It is eschew. To eschew something is a very active repudiation, like stalking away from it in a contrary direction. It’s as deliberate as seeking the thing out in order to avoid it – with a hint of sniffing round what’s secretly desired, too. Eschew is still current, but it isn’t used much – perhaps it’s too disdainful, too prideful. I like it because it’s such a mouthful of crooked letters, like a sneeze, and sounds as if it must be from Old French (it is – I just looked it up). I love cochineal, too, which we once used to colour icing pink for cakes – now, with much less poetry, we use “red food colouring”. My grandpa was a traveller in fancy goods for the Co-op, and my nana’s pantry (pantry, another good word) was full of tiny corked bottles of colouring and vanilla and almond and peppermint essences, and a box of silver sugar balls like tiny ball bearings, hard enough to break your teeth. I seem to have known, with awe, from an early age, that cochineal was made from the crushed bodies of insects – this was exotic and disturbing, an insight into adult ingenuity.

Blake Morrison: whiffle-whaffle

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Blake Morrison. Photograph: David Hartley/Rex Features

Richard Blakeborough’s 1911 book Wit, Character, Folklore and Customs of the North Riding of Yorkshire contains a glossary of 4,000 dialect words, some of them known to me from my (West Riding) childhood, others fallen into disuse, all fascinating in one way or another – from baufy (strong), belder (shout), and boggart (a ghost) to splaudy (wide-spreading), splunder (burst) and whiffle-whaffle (talk). I discovered the book at the time Peter Sutcliffe was murdering women in the 1980s, and it struck me how many local dialect words were abusive of women, either for talking too much or, more usually, for promiscuity – nazz‑moll, trail-tripe, gadabout, flappysket, drabbletail and gammerstang were all ways of saying it. To my mind, this vein of language became a way explaining Sutcliffe – not as a one-off psychopath but as a product of a misogynistic culture, and I made use of dialect in my long poem “The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper”. That’s the murky underside of regional slang. The surface is lighter, funnier and more inventive. Is there a better word for food than belly-timber, or for a cup of tea (over which conversation takes place) than chatter-water? Familiar creatures appear in a new light: the robin as a ruddock; the hedgehog as a prickyback. A honey-fall is a rare piece of luck; less fortunate souls, including those who get daddly or nazzled (drunk), may suffer dodderums (violent shakings), scutters (diarrhoea) or a clunter (a heavy fall), in which case they’ll own up to being nobbut middlin (a touch unwell). There are many Yorkshire dialect words for fools and scoundrels, bizzumhead, dunderknowle, hauvey-gauvey, ragabash and fustilugs among them. Perhaps my favourite word of all is t’owerance, the upper hand, the power exercised by one person over another, because it echoes a word that’s almost its opposite, “tolerance”.

Paul Kingsnorth: swamm

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Paul Kingsnorth. Photograph: Gary Calton

When I was writing my novel, The Wake, I immersed myself in the Old English language that people in England would have spoken before 1066. The entire novel is written in a version of Old English and so I had to dig into a word hoard of ancient terms for everyday objects. One of those words was the Anglo-Saxon word for mushroom: swamm. I assumed this was a long-dead word, like so many of the others in the novel, and I thought no more about it until after the book was published, when I was contacted by a reader whose grandmother had lived in the Forest of Dean. He told me he could remember her referring to mushrooms as swamms when he was a child.

The idea of this old word hanging on in a remote part of England for more than a thousand years is captivating, and it makes me wonder how many other Old English terms for everyday objects are still hiding out on the margins, even in our age of standardisation. After 1066, Norman French became the language of the aristocracy but Old English remained the language of the peasants. Many of the words we still use that derive from Old English refer to natural things that ordinary people would have had direct relationships with every day: tree, water, swine, hound, sheep, meadow, field, summer, winter, rain, fire. And perhaps still swamm, too – and who knows what else?

John Sutherland: widdershins

Facebook Twitter Pinterest John Sutherland. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

It’s one of those words that, when you come across it, fills a hole in your vocabulary that has bothered you for years. How, in company where, as they say, you must “watch your tongue” would you communicate the meaning of “arse about face”?

The military command about turn doesn’t do it – except on the parade ground. Nor does the vertically indicative (but lovely) topsy turvy. We know that, in the coins jingling in our pocket, the queen’s head is obversive and the heraldic stuff on the other side reversive. But in this context arse about face is positively lese-majesty.

The word, which slips into the gap, like Cinderella’s foot into the glass slipper, is widdershins (sometimes smoothed into withershins – the etymology is uncertain, probably Celtic). It is usually glossed as anti-clockwise or anti-sunwise. But the word carries with it more interesting semantic cargo. It’s one of those words with a powerful, very strange, penumbral aura.

When it comes to aura some words have it, some don’t. If you say “I’m right-handed, you’re left-handed” you merely state an observed anatomical fact. If you say “Don’t be taken in by my dexterity, despite the spurious rightness, I’m a suppressed sinister” auras swirl.

I was first introduced to widdershins late in life by a friend, Paul Barber, who was writing the authoritative study Vampires, Burial and Death. Why, Barber speculated, were vampires everywhere (the myth is culturally universal – Chinese vampires, unlike Dracula, favour white clothes) buried mouth-down in the graveyard dirt, never face up? Widdershins. Sometimes the interred vampire is restless, seeking release – there’s a link with the proverbial “he’d turn [spin] in his grave if he heard you say that”.

Barber, in his hunt for widdershinery went on to examine how, in magical ritual, religious patterns are methodically reversed – not in a spirit of denial but with the aim of getting entrance into the spirit world.

Widdershins is one of those words that weaves narratives when you roll it round your tongue.

Nina Stibbe: fetlock

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nina Stibbe. Photograph: Alecsandra Raluca Dragoi

It was in Father Ted – the episode called “A Song for Ireland” where Ted and Dougal have stayed up all night writing the song “My Lovely Horse” – that I heard the word fetlock again (“My lovely horse, running through the field / Where are you going, with your fetlocks blowing in the wind?”). And I was reminded of the beauty of horse jargon.

At seven years old I was given a pony of my own. I didn’t really want one but – for reasons I shan’t go into – it was simpler to go along with it. And, although I disliked being a pony owner and found all the nonsense annoying, I absolutely loved the words.

Not just the anatomical ones such as fetlock, withers, gaskin and chin-groove, but words from across the horsey lexicon.

From the tack room: kimblewick, snaffle, martingale, surcingle, crupper, twitch, stirrup, neatsfoot oil and crop. The grooming kit: currycomb, dandy brush, hoof oil and wisp. The feed shed: the bran mash, pony nuts, flake maize and salt lick. Common ailments: bog spavin, laminitis, sweet itch, crib-biting, wind sucking, and warbles. The horses: Arab, Connemara, Welsh mountain, Appaloosa, Lipizzaner, dapple-grey, palomino, dun and strawberry roan. The riding: the rising trot, canter, gallop, the rearing up, the bucking and the bolting off. The gymkhana: Chase-me-Charlie, musical hats, fetch-the-wife and best-turned-out.

Overall, I hated being a pony owner and even at seven felt the hugeness of the responsibility and worried I’d be mistaken for posh. And though I disliked the flasks of oxtail soup and trotting along in jodhpurs saluting scowling drivers for slowing down, I will always love the word fetlock.