Summer is here! June can generally be relied upon to be a good month in terms of the weather, just as August is usually awful and July is a bit hit and miss. That's fits in well with the school summer holiday - half of July and all of August.
We only went away for 1 night but when we came back the roses were blooming and new flowers had appeared all over the garden. This morning I tied string around the clumps of the big crocosmia before they start flopping all over the drive. I found some time to sit in the sun and I was back at school this afternoon. It was PE with the little ones and we were able to go out on the field to do lots of jumping and a little bit of relay racing thinking ahead to sports' day at the end of term.
While we were at the wedding the conversation turned to the way we talk. For such a small country the UK has a richness of regional accents and dialects making it almost possible to pinpoint the town a person comes from. Birmingham and Liverpool are less than 100 miles apart but have unmistakably distinct accents while the Stoke accent, that's where Laura comes from, is different again. There the general term of greeting for women is Duck while children are Duck Eggs. (The u is pronounced like the oo in book.) So today I've been calling the children in school Duck Eggs. Down here the equivalent greeting is Love or Darlin'. Peter as a natural linguist picks up the accent of whichever place he is in while my accent went from Cornish to Canadian to standard English and got stuck in a general London accent. More West London than East London (Cockney).
2 comments:
Here in the states, although I can't speak to the difference in addressing people, we have regional accents. There are also regional terms that differ. Interesting.
Laura has just told me that her Scottish nan called her bern (child) and I know that in Glasgow women get called hin or hinny while in Wales the welsh word cariad (sweetheart) is quite common.
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