Burn ash-wood green,
’Tis fire for a Queen;
Burn ash-wood sare,
’Twool make a man swear.
There is a ring of poetry in the mere sound of such a word as dimble (Der. Not. Lei.) for dingle, an echo of Ben Jonson’s line: ‘Within a gloomy dimble she doth dwell’; and the expression a wimpling burn (n. counties) seems to carry with it the note of fresh, running water.
Words of Academic Character
Beside these, are the words with a savour of academic learning such as: accord (Wor. Hrf.) for agree, e.g. ’Im an’ ’er can’t accard together no waay; element (n. and sw. counties) for sky, atmosphere. A Somersetshire man describing a thunder-storm said: Th’element was all to a flicker. The Yorkshire proverbial saying: Ah could na more do it ner ah could fly into t’element, is worth recording before the oncoming cloud of aeroplanes has made us forget that it could ever typify the impossible. The term cabal can be used to describe a group of people met together for gossip, e.g. There wor Jane, an’ Hoppy, an’ Sal, an’ the hull cabal on ’em i’ the lane (Not.), or it can signify a great noise of talking, &c., e.g. They war makkin’ a fine auld cabal at t’public-hoose last neet (Wm.). In some parts of Ireland a gladiathor is a well-known term for a fine fellow, a roysterer, a fighter, e.g. Whin I comes acrass a man who has two or three hundred pounds, an’ sees all his capers an’ antics, I says to meself, What a gladiathur ye are. But here we have to deal also with the change of meaning which the literary word has undergone, and as the majority of what we have termed learned words are used in a transferred sense in the dialects, the remainder of our examples must be carried over into the next chapter.