Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from A Contribution to an Essex Dialect Dictionary
When we were children, we were not allowed to say afeared, or drownded, or to call a fork a prong, or a person a party. Such words were vulgar, so our parents and teachers told us. We' rendered our instructors the obedience that Vic torian times very properly exacted; but we now see that they did not know what they were talking about. Read the records of these and other such-like words in this little treatise, and see that they are high-class literary words, and that, if we are wickeder than our forefathers, we are to this extent wiser.
My attempt is to set down, as far as I am able, the dialect and colloquial speech of our little district. It is not claimed that anything here is peculiar to the district. Very few words are peculiar even to the county. Many are common to us and East Anglia. Many are, more or less in general use all over the country. Yet it is most remarkable what shades of difference occur, in pronunciation at least, even in ad joining parishes. For instance, shan't appears here as shakt, there as shait, shet, shay, and so on, all in a small district. Where one of these forms is established, the others do not, or seldom, appear. And the vocabulary, generally, varies like wise. 'words used commonly in one parish may be unknown, or seldom used, in the next parish, but turn up again a little further afield. There is no reckoning with dialect in the occurrence of its words. Elusive and sporadic, they are just like plants, which will have their particular soil; and who can say exactly in each case what that particular soil is? And so, no doubt, all over the county. It is a fact to bear in mind. In some of my friends who - a precious few - observe and appreciate our dialect, I notice the cramping idea that the speech of their own parish is the only true Essex dialect. Even of the supreme example, the talk of Father William and his associates, I have heard it said, Oh, I don't call that Essex dialect. Our people don't talk like that. Essex dialect is, of course, the combination of all these local varying tongues and when the Essex Dialect Dictionary appears, we shall at last have it in all its fullness and glory before our eyes.
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