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Mackems, Geordies and ram-raiders: documenting regional variation in historical dictionaries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2015

PHILIP DURKIN
PHILIP DURKIN*
Affiliation:
Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, UKphilip.durkin@oup.com
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Abstract

The article examines the challenges encountered by historical dictionaries in documenting regional variation in lexis, and in recording and describing the association of lexical items with particular regionally based linguistic identities. After a short section looking at general issues in labelling the regional distribution and provenance of lexical items in historical dictionaries, it looks in detail at the OED’s treatment of three test cases: Mackem ‘person from Sunderland or Wearside’; pet as a term of endearment or form of address; and ram-raid and related terms. All three have some connection with the north-east of England, but this differs greatly in each case: ram-raid (probably) originated in Tyneside, but there is now little awareness of this either inside or outside the north-east; pet did not originate in the north-east, nor is it restricted to use in this region, but it is widely recognized as a marker of north-eastern (or sometimes specifically Tyneside) linguistic identity; Mackem has little currency outside the north-east, but within the region it has some importance in signalling a distinctive Sunderland or Wearside linguistic and cultural identity. The article places these different lexical histories in the context of current research on enregisterment of lexis, and examines how definitions, labelling, descriptive notes and carefully selected quotation evidence can all be pressed into service in attempting to present nuanced accounts of the histories of such lexical items in a historical dictionary.

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Type
Research Article
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English Language & Linguistics , Volume 19 , Special Issue 2: Sense of place in the history of English , July 2015, pp. 313 - 326
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

1 Introduction

This article examines the difficulties in documenting regional variation in vocabulary in historical dictionaries, drawing its examples from the OED’s coverage of the English of England. (This geographical constraint in no way reflects a restriction in the OED’s own coverage, but is purely a pragmatic one in order to give this article a clear focus.) In particular, it examines a group of words all associated to varying degrees with the north-east of England. This geographical focus is intended in tribute to, as well as to draw upon, the work of Joan Beal who has been foremost among those looking to redress the balance in researching regional variation in lexis in recent decades, often with a focus on the north-east (see especially Beal Reference Beal2010: 53–71).

Tracing the regional distribution of lexis from a historical perspective is a much-neglected area of study. One of the main reasons for this disregard is the difficulties that lexis poses for variationist approaches to language study. The dictum that ‘chaque mot a son histoire’ is so often quoted because it rings so true,Footnote 1 and each word history typically shows its own unique pattern of changing regional distribution over time, often reflecting varying patterns of use in different idiolects in any one synchronic slice of language use. Work in the last several decades has highlighted the complex issues involved in analysing the distribution of lexis in England from a synchronic (or in some cases relatively shallow diachronic) perspective. For approaches to both traditional dialect lexis (as, for example, in the materials from the Survey of English Dialects (SED)) and lexis associated with modern regional or urban varieties (as, for example, collected through the BBC Voices project), see Viereck (Reference Viereck, Kastovsky and Szwedek1986), Upton et al. (Reference Upton, Parry and Widdowson1994), Thomas (Reference Thomas, Viereck and Ramisch1997), Holliday et al. (Reference Holliday, Upton, Thompson, Robinson, Herring and Gilbert2013), Wieling et al. (Reference Wieling, Upton and Thompson2014) inter alia. Documenting this complexity even from a synchronic perspective, still less a diachronic one, poses enormous challenges for historical dictionaries, both in terms of data and labelling.

This article investigates some of the issues involved, particularly through the lens of lexical items associated with or originating in modern urban varieties of the north-east of England. After a brief contextualizing discussion of general issues in section 2, section 3 looks in detail at three test cases:

  • • Mackem, a term that is recorded only from the last four decades, denoting a person from Sunderland or Wearside, or more specifically a supporter of Sunderland Association Football Club. It contrasts sharply with Geordie, denoting a person from Tyneside or more loosely (and especially outside the region) denoting anyone from the north-east. Geordie has a much longer recorded history than Mackem, and (from an early date in its recorded history) much greater currency outside the north-east. By contrast, published written attestations of Mackem are predominantly from within the north-east.

  • • Pet in use as a term of endearment or form of address. Neither the word (recorded from the sixteenth century denoting a tame animal) nor its use as a term of endearment or form of address are at all likely to have originated in the north-east of England, but such use today frequently functions (both inside and outside the region) as a marker of north-eastern identity.

  • • The related cluster of words ram raid noun, ram-raid verb, ram-raider noun, and ram-raiding noun, all of which refer to the use of a car (or other motor vehicle) to ram a window, door, or wall as part of a smash-and-grab robbery. Consideration of the available evidence on the history of these terms suggests that an origin in Tyneside is likely, or, failing this, it seems very likely that use in and with reference to Tyneside has been the catalyst for wider adoption over a very short time period; such an origin was widely commented on in the early history of these terms, for instance, in newspaper reports. However, unlike Mackem, or pet, the use of ram raid and its derivatives seems to have had little salience in the construction of particular regional linguistic identities.

In examining the differing histories shown by these items the concept of enregisterment is useful, i.e. ‘processes through which a linguistic repertoire becomes differentiable within a language as a socially recognized register of forms’ (Agha Reference Agha2003: 231), particularly as explored in relation to lexical (and other) features of different northern English varieties by Beal (Reference Beal2009). Pet is widely identified as a marker of north-eastern (or sometimes more specifically Tyneside) identity in contemporary British culture, and its use can act as a highly compressed index of such an identity both within the region and beyond. By contrast, ram raid and related terms may have a Tyneside origin, but play very little role in signalling a Tyneside (or broader north-eastern) identity either within the north-east or beyond. The situation is different again in the case of Mackem: the term has relatively little currency outside the north-east, but within the region has some importance in flagging a specifically Sunderland/Wearside linguistic identity; in particular, in the north-east it appears to have an increasing role in identifying a Sunderland/Wearside variety distinct from the much more deeply enregistered ‘Geordie’ Tyneside variety, in contrast to the situation outside the region, where all north-eastern English is frequently collapsed under a catch-all category ‘Geordie’. Section 3 looks in more detail at the data supporting these observations, as well as at the methodological challenges for OED in presenting these differing situations in a diachronic perspective.

2 Background: general issues concerning how to indicate the regional distribution of words, forms, or meanings in historical dictionaries

2.1 The nature of the data and the problems this presents

The OED takes a very long historical perspective on lexical history and change, but the nature of the available evidence is very different for diverse historical periods, and this needs to be negotiated carefully by lexicographers and users. What is said about regional distribution of items in Old English (OE), Middle English (ME) and even Early Modern English (EModE) in historical dictionaries is typically philologically driven. Except in the case of the highest-frequency words, the geographical distribution of the surviving attestations of word use is likely to be patchy, and much reliance is traditionally placed on analysis of linguistic features (especially the outputs of sound changes known to have distinctive outputs in different geographical areas). Largely as a result of the methodological difficulties involved, there is very little tradition of work on systematic identification of regional provenance of lexis which is not reflected in distinctive morphological or phonological criteria. There are, of course, notable exceptions, such as Wenisch (Reference Wenisch1979), which focuses on Anglian lexis in OE. McIntosh et al. (Reference McIntosh, Samuels and Benskin1986) provides invaluable maps for a number of high-frequency, closed-class lexical items in later ME. The wealth of data provided by the Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English offers the tantalizing prospect of being able to push such work further even for one of the periods most affected by paucity of sources (see especially Laing & Lass Reference Laing, Lass, van Kemenade and Los2006), although whether the extant sources are sufficient to analyse word geography for any but the highest-frequency words remains to be tested in detail. Work that is not driven (solely) by philological analysis of morphological or phonological criteria has had some success in identifying regional trends with regard to type frequency of loanwords of different origins (especially Scandinavian) in ME and in later dialects.Footnote 2 However, this work is generally fed by data from attestations in historical dictionaries and (latterly) corpora, and has had only very limited feedback input on the analysis in historical dictionaries.

For the later English of England, especially from the period of the dialect surveys of the nineteenth century onwards, we have much richer data, for instance, from the English Dialect Society materials that fed into the English Dialect Dictionary (EDD). However, using such sources is not straightforward either as we cannot be sure whether or not the process of compilation even approximated to a rigorous analysis of all lexical data in a corpus, or whether it has instead been slanted towards salient localisms, such as loanwords resulting from local contact situations, or to items with emblematic cultural significance. If surveys have been employed, how has data been elicited, and has the subject matter already been slanted in a particular direction? Have some geographical areas, social registers, or technical (e.g. trades) vocabularies been over-represented and others under-represented in the data collection underlying a particular survey? In the case of the EDD, to what extent is its composite picture affected by differences in the quality and quantity of the data it was able to draw on for different localities? Perhaps more fundamentally, what are the assumptions at play in extrapolating from a set of attestations that a lexical item should be labelled as e.g. ‘south Worcestershire’, ‘Worcestershire and Herefordshire’, ‘south-west midland’ and so on, explored more fully in section 2.2 regarding John Clare's vocabulary? Factors such as urban varieties are at least tacitly recognized in traditional methodologies in historical lexicography, as is the interplay with standard varieties. However, factors such as the relationship between lexis and matters of regional identity correlated with age, gender, or various different occupational, religious, or cultural groupings remain largely ‘under the radar’ in all but the most recent work.Footnote 3

2.2 Challenges in labelling

A major challenge for historical lexicographers is that the dialect boundaries identified by linguists are (for good reason) not the same for all historical periods, and additionally may not correspond at all well with geographical designations used outside linguistic work. For instance, for most specialists in ME, Cheshire and most or all of Lancashire (including the modern urban districts within the former county boundaries) falls within the midland, or specifically north-west midland, dialect area. This allocation to large dialect areas is based on the typical distribution of a relatively small number of distinctive phonological and morphological features. A similar methodology underlies many analyses of traditional dialect areas of modern English, i.e. of the dialect divisions prevailing at the end of the nineteenth century but now reflected if at all in the speech of older speakers in rural communities, in which Cheshire and Lancashire are, again, typically placed in a midland or central dialect area. However, application of similar methodology to contemporary English dialects typically places some of this area in the north and some in a central area, while necessarily now distinguishing the largely urban varieties of Central Lancashire and Merseyside as significant distinct varieties. See especially the analyses of traditional and contemporary English dialects in Trudgill (Reference Trudgill1999). Thus, if a word is found in sources originating from Warwickshire in the south to the vicinity of Manchester in the north, a ME specialist may happily understand all of this distribution as falling under ‘midland’, as may someone who has in mind the traditional dialect areas of modern English, but the term is likely to be understood differently by someone who is referring to the contemporary dialects of England. In either case, a division formulated on the basis of a relatively small number of phonological and morphological features is being pressed into service as a short-hand method for describing the geographical distribution of lexical items, with inevitable tensions.

Additionally, a dictionary for a broad readership such as the OED must pay particular attention to the assumptions likely to be made by readers who have little or no knowledge of the dialect areas established by linguists, and who may understand what is meant by general geographical indicators very differently. To continue with the same example, in most general, non-linguistic, analyses of the regions of modern England, all of Cheshire and Lancashire (including the modern urban districts) are considered to fall within the north-west. A further complication is that non-linguists’ conceptions of dialect areas typically focus more on urban districts than on county boundaries (see e.g. Montgomery Reference Montgomery, Stoeckle, Streck, Schwarz and Hansen2012).

This creates real difficulties for lexicographers, especially when dealing with material which shows a long history. The distribution of lexical items does not necessarily correspond at all closely with dialect areas within any period, and in attempting to describe succinctly an item's distribution diachronically the lexicographer must reckon with the fact that designations such as ‘midland’, ‘north-west midland’, or ‘north-western’ may be understood differently by different readers, according to the knowledge and assumptions they bring with them.

No entirely satisfactory solution has yet been found for this problem. In the OED there is a general preference for using geographical indicators such as ‘north-western’ in their usual meanings with reference to non-linguistically defined regions of modern England, and for using traditional county names with reference to their traditional boundaries in most cases where greater specificity is required. However, when describing contemporary English distributions of lexical items, reference to the names of urban areas may often be preferred for non-rural parts of England as I exemplify further in section 3. Before moving on to these, it is worth considering a representative example of the sorts of difficulties that can also be encountered with labelling earlier material from rural locations. The noun pooty denoting the banded or grove snail, Cepaea nemoralis, and the compound pooty shell are attested only in the writings of John Clare (1793–1864), in subsequent echoes of his work, and in a few other later uses which probably also stem ultimately from Clare. It is not possible to establish how widely the word may have been used beyond Clare (excluding later uses in what we may term loosely the ‘Clare tradition’). Although his uses, in prose as well as verse, seem to show a local word, it appears among the items in the glossary prepared by Clare's publisher John Taylor from information provided by the poet in The Village Minstrel, and Other Poems (1821), identified in its full title as being ‘by John Clare, the Northamptonshire Peasant’ (see discussion in Bate Reference Bate2003: 224). The word appears, attributed to Clare, in the Northamptonshire glossaries by Sternberg (Reference Sternberg1851) and Baker (Reference Baker1854), and similarly in the EDD. OED labels its entry ‘Eng. regional (Northants.)’, but gives the important note ‘Chiefly in the writings of John Clare and in echoes of and references to them’; OED thus follows here in the tradition of EDD and its sources, providing a label that complies with the traditional default to the county as a unit, but with an important and much more informative qualification describing the limited nature of the evidence.Footnote 4

3 Case studies

3.1 Mackem

The noun Mackem has a relatively short history (OED’s earliest example is dated 1980–1) and has a strong association with the north-east. The OED entry is labelled ‘Brit. colloq. (orig. Eng. regional (north-east.)).’ The definition and quotations do a lot more work in identifying the typical contexts of use. The definition has both a general and a more specific clause: ‘A native or inhabitant of Sunderland or Wearside; a supporter of Sunderland Association Football Club.’ This second clause makes clear the association with football, and the quotations make clearer still the characteristic use in distinguishing supporters of Sunderland (the football team of the city of Sunderland, situated at the mouth of the River Wear, approximately thirteen miles south-east of Newcastle upon Tyne) from supporters of Newcastle United (the football team of Newcastle upon Tyne). As noted in Beal et al. (Reference Beal, Burbano-Elizondo and Llamas2012: 15), OED’s earliest example (from 1980–1) is from a Newcastle United fanzine, although some of the other examples show use in self-identification by people from Sunderland and/or Sunderland supporters. The word probably originated as an allusion to the longer phrase mack 'em and tack 'em, which probably refers to the shipbuilding industry of the region, and OED gives an example of this longer phrase dated 1973 from a Sunderland Cricket & Rugby Football Club Centenary Programme.

The labelling employed for Mackem contrasts with that for Geordie in its uses denoting someone from Tyneside or the north-east in general, which is labelled in OED simply Brit. colloq. The apparent inconsistency is intentional: although Geordie denotes someone from Tyneside or the north-east, the term does not appear to be restricted to this geographical region even in the earliest examples known to the OED; the same appears to be true also of earlier generic uses denoting either a miner from Tyneside or the north-east or a sailor from the same region, especially a member of the crew of a collier ship. A note in the etymology section documents the ‘frequent occurrence of the male forename in popular songs and ballads from 1793 or earlier as a forename of pitmen, colliers, and other men working in the mining industry’; such use falls outside the scope of the main part of the dictionary entry, which covers only generic uses denoting any pitman, collier, etc., rather than as a conventional nickname. The etymology section also gives a reference to Wales (Reference Wales2006) for more detailed coverage of the historical data and likely pattern of development. OED’s definition makes it clear that both a broader and a narrower application of the term Geordie is typically found: ‘A native or inhabitant of Tyneside or a neighbouring region of north-east England’, and an accompanying note expands on this:

Now usually understood to designate a Tynesider, esp. one from Newcastle upon Tyne, but freq[uently] used to refer to a person from anywhere in the north-east of England.

What this does not do (in common with coverage of many similar terms in the OED) is attempt to identify which speakers typically use the term with either the broader or narrower application. Beal et al. (Reference Beal, Burbano-Elizondo and Llamas2012: 10–14, 16–17) remark on the differing perceptions of this term used by speakers inside and outside the north-east, and on the frequent frustration voiced by native inhabitants of the north-east at use of the term Geordie by people outside the region to denote anyone from the north-east. Again, the OED entry does include quotations that point to this issue, although it does not provide the same wealth of detail as more specialist studies.

The entries for Mackem and Geordie both document key terms in defining different types of north-eastern identity; in the case of Mackem, the application is narrower geographically or in terms of community (Wearside, Sunderland, or supporters of Sunderland's football team), and the term is also typically used within a much more restricted range of contexts (appearing in print especially in the regional press and in writing about football). In each case, the OED entry endeavours to document the history of use, including both the likely origin and subsequent development over time. In each case, labelling (at the level of the entry or the sense), etymology, definition, and the illustrative quotations work closely together, building up a composite picture of use.

3.2 Pet

Terms of endearment frequently serve as salient indicators of regional identity. Pet is widely familiar as a marker of north-eastern identity in contemporary British culture, as for instance in the title of the 1980s television series Auf Wiedersehen, Pet.Footnote 5 Covering this lexeme in a historical dictionary like the OED poses some interesting challenges. This is but one pattern of use shown by a polysemous word with a long history: pet is actually a loanword from Scottish Gaelic peata ‘tame animal’, now also ‘spoilt child’. It is found first in Scots, from the sixteenth century, with the meaning (as defined by OED) of ‘a lamb or (later occas[ionally]) other domestic animal reared by hand’, in which it is restricted largely to Scots, the north of England, and the north of Ireland. The (regionally unrestricted) meaning ‘an animal (typically one which is domestic or tame) kept for pleasure or companionship’ emerges in the early eighteenth century. Application to humans is also found from the early eighteenth century, at first in Scots. OED documents the use as a term of endearment or form of address within a sense defined as: ‘A sweet, obedient, or obliging person. Freq. used as a term of endearment, or as a familiar form of address’. The earliest example given is from 1767 in a scene from the musical play The Disappointment by Andrew Barton (probably a pseudonym), written and produced in North America. In this play, pet is used as a term of endearment and as a form of address both by the character Raccoon, who is characterized by the use of dialect features apparently intended to represent a Pennsylvania Dutch background, and (echoing his speech) by the character Mrs Placket, who is not so characterized.Footnote 6 Such use is found historically in a number of different varieties of English, and the OED entry does not attempt to identify or document all of these explicitly. The north-east English use is, however, illustrated by a 1991 example from the Newcastle-upon-Tyne-based adult comic Viz, in which pet figures as part of a broad characterization of Newcastle upon Tyne speech: ‘Aye Pet, sur anyways, I've got this mega cushty job y'knaa.’ The line is spoken by the eponymous character in the strip ‘Sid the Sexist’, whose Geordie identity is established by both lexis (as in his use of pet, aye, or anyways here, or lass in the next frame)Footnote 7 and eye-dialect spellings (like sur ‘so’ or knaa ‘know’). In a 2006 article in The Guardian newspaper, written in a response to guidance reportedly given by Newcastle upon Tyne city council to exercise care in the use of terms of endearment such as pet, the creator of ‘Sid the Sexist’, Simon Donald, placed his deployment of the term explicitly in a tradition of media depictions of Geordies including the 1970s television series Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? as well as the later Auf Wiedersehen, Pet. He also comments revealingly on the pragmatics of the fictional Sid's use of pet:

Sid is a man who is unable to communicate with women. He is desperate to impress them, but is totally lacking in social skills. He thinks he must use foul and offensive chat-up lines on women to impress his friends, but can't see why they don't impress the girls. He tries to soften the blow of his outrageous behaviour with nice, friendly Geordie words. Sid thinks that a few ‘hinnys’Footnote 8 and ‘pets’ thrown liberally into his disgusting conversation will win the hearts of women.Footnote 9

Within the limited confines of a historical dictionary entry, OED thus includes an example which comes from a significant step in a series of deployments of pet in mass media representations of north-eastern, and specifically Tyneside, speech (and which may be seen as a component of the process of enregisterment of this lexical item as part of the Geordie dialect).

3.3 Ram raid, ram-raid, ram-raider and ram-raiding

The cluster of words ram raid, ram-raider and ram-raiding (nouns) and ram-raid (verb) all refer to the use of a car (or other motor vehicle) to ram a window, door, or wall as part of a smash-and-grab robbery. None is explicitly labelled in OED as originating in the north-east of England (i.e. with ‘orig. Eng. regional (north-east.)’, as in the case of Mackem), although this involved some difficult editorial decision-making, drawing on questions not just of geographical provenance of the earliest examples, but also of speaker perceptions, in so far as these can be established.

The earliest attestations OED has for each item in this cluster are: 3 April 1987 for ram-raider, from the Newcastle upon Tyne Evening Chronicle; 12 November 1987 for ram raid (noun), from the same newspaper; 7 November 1990 for ram-raiding, from PR Newswire, in a report stating that ‘Car theft and related crime such as “ram raiding”. . .is a multi-million pound problem on Tyneside’; and 17 July 1991 for ram-raid (verb), from the national newspaper The Independent, in a report referring to a quite different geographical location in England: ‘In the Cotswolds, more than a dozen antiques shops have been ram-raided in the last three months’. The first examples available to OED for these items thus present a varied picture: in the case of the earliest-attested items, a Newcastle upon Tyne newspaper; ram-raiding is first found in a source not based in the north-east but identifiable as a use referring to the north-east; and ram-raid (verb) was first attested in a national newspaper with a use referring to events in the south-west midlands.

Each published OED entry, for any but the rarest words, presents only a sample from the range of available examples. With respect to the use of relatively common words in recent decades, as here, this will be a very small sample from a huge number of possible examples. In the case of ram-raider, for instance, there are two further quotations in the OED entry, one from 1994 from a Bristol newspaper, the other from 2006 in the Parramatta Advertiser (from New South Wales, Australia), selected to show spread to other parts of England and beyond (as well as continuity of use, and for the content of the quoted sentence). In the case of ram raid (noun), the 1987 first quotation from the Newcastle upon Tyne Evening Chronicle is followed by a quotation from 1991, from Viz (compare comments on pet in section 3.2). In this example, the line ‘We have a report of a ram raid in progress’ occurs in the strip ‘The Brown Bottle’ (a parody of the superhero genre, in which the hero's ‘transformation’ into incapacitated would-be crime fighter results from overconsumption of Newcastle Brown Ale). The geographical focus thus remains Newcastle upon Tyne, but the genre is different. Additionally, the intended readership is national, Viz having been at this point in its history one of the best-selling magazines in the UK. The next example is from 1995, from the British music magazine Melody Maker, again showing impact beyond news journalism; the quotation also shows extended, metaphorical use, an artistic work being dubbed ‘a prodigiously successful ram-raid’. The final example given is from 2000 from Ralph, an Australian ‘lad's magazine’, showing both geographical spread, and, again, use of the term beyond traditional news journalism.

The OED entries for each of these four items were originally published (as additions to the entry ram n.4) in 1997, although some changes and additions were made when the full sequence of entries containing ram was published as part of OED’s comprehensive revision programme in 2008. It is interesting to see how the picture they present compares with what can be constructed from online resources currently available. Gale NewsVault is useful for making possible searches of the back issues of numerous newspapers, especially for the period in question here particularly useful are issues of The Times and The Financial Times. The evidence from these two sources provides a valuable picture of the spread of ram raid and related terms in the national print media, and also gives useful information on early perceptions surrounding each term. The term ram-raider makes an early appearance in The Times in 1989 in a television review column, commenting on a programme on social trends entitled ‘How to Survive Lifestyle’:

Advertisers..can impress prospective clients by dividing the market into those who shop at Benetton, those who don't and those who smash the windows and steal the jumpers. The latter, incidentally, are known as ‘Ram Raiders’.Footnote 10

Here no association is made with the north-east. The situation is somewhat different in a story from April 1991 where ram-raiders occurs in an interview on car theft with a representative from Northumbria police, identified as one of the areas worst affected by car crime.Footnote 11 However, even here neither the term nor the phenomenon is explicitly identified with the north-east. Similarly, ram-raid (noun) is discussed in The Times in July 1991, in an article which identifies Northumbria as ‘the worst affected area’.Footnote 12 By contrast, in August of 1991 ram-raiders active in Wiltshire are mentioned in a very short crime report in The Times.Footnote 13 An article from the same source on 14 September 1991 speculates that a spate of ram-raiding robberies of antique traders across England results from copying the technique employed in a robbery of a New Bond Street jeweller's in July 1990.Footnote 14 Articles from July 1990 describing this robbery that I have traced do not use ram-raid or related terms,Footnote 15 but it is notable that by September 1991 the association has been made by at least one journalist. A steady stream of mentions of ram-raid(s), ram-raiders, and ram-raiding continues through the second half of 1991, especially in the context of discussing the riots that occurred in a number of localities in England in September of that year, and more particularly with reference to incidents of ram-raiding in Tyneside (often mentioned together with incidents of ‘joy-riding’, or stealing and driving a vehicle at speed for pleasure, in Oxford). A Financial Times column of 16 September headed ‘Crime and the Inner City Environment’ employs a reference to ‘the young car thieves and ram raiders of Newcastle and Oxford’ as part of an analogy for the attitudes of brokers and investment bankers in major financial centres.Footnote 16 A letter published in the same newspaper on 21 September 1991 from the chairman of the Tyne and Wear Development Corporation says that the recent riots ‘are..an aberration caused by criminal elements associated with ram raids and massive auto-theft’,Footnote 17 while its motoring column on 25 October in the same year notes that ‘High-performance cars were particular popular [sic] among youths practising “joyriding” and “ramraiding” during the recent riots in Oxford and Newcastle’.Footnote 18 A piece entitled ‘Lessons from the Maxwell Collapse’ in The Financial Times on 19 December 1991 again employs ram raiding as part of an analogy, i.e. the position of auditors being likened to that of manufacturers supplying burglar alarms to premises which are then ram-raided.Footnote 19 At the beginning of 1992, the addition of ram-raid and ram-raiding to (smaller) Oxford dictionaries is itself newsworthy, featuring in the headline of a news piece ‘New words ram-raid linguistic showcase’ in The Times on 3 January.Footnote 20

This brief survey of early newspaper mentions of ram-raid(s), ram-raiders and ram-raiding brings some interesting points to light. Firstly, it chimes well with the localization in OED’s (considerably earlier) first examples in the Tyneside area: it seems a reasonably safe hypothesis that these terms first came to national prominence as a result of their use in Tyneside. However, it is also clear that the terms are not closely associated with Tyneside English by most early users. The introduction of these lexemes is not typically accompanied by comments such as ‘as this phenomenon is called in Tyneside’, and references to ram-raiding elsewhere in England or beyond show no particular awareness of use of a term originally restricted to Tyneside, while at least one journalist attributes its origin (apparently quite mistakenly) to a particular robbery in London.

Taken together, this evidence supports OED’s decision to treat ram-raid and its derivatives differently from Mackem: an origin in Tyneside seems likely, or, failing this, it seems very likely that use in and with reference to Tyneside has been the catalyst for wider adoption over a very short time period. However, unlike Mackem, or pet, the use of ram-raid etc. seems to have had little salience in the construction of particular regional linguistic identities, and to have little likelihood of becoming an enregistered term.

4 Conclusions

Regional variation in lexical use presents particular difficulties for historical dictionaries. Data on changing patterns of usage and distribution over time are difficult to collect, and succinct presentation of the results of this research for dictionary readers presents real challenges for lexicographers. Documenting lexis associated with modern urban varieties poses challenges just as real as those generated by material from traditional dialects and from earlier centuries. In most cases, labelling alone cannot be expected to carry all of the weight: the careful selection of quotation evidence always has an important part to play, as often does comment either in the definition or in associated notes, or in the etymological discussion. This is shown by the test cases examined here, which differ not only in their regional distribution but also in their salience in constructions of regional identity. Pet is widely used in the north-east, and is very much recognized outside the region as a marker of north-eastern (or often specifically Tyneside) identity. Mackem has little currency outside the north-east, but within the region has some importance in the nascent enregisterment of a distinct linguistic identity for the native inhabitants of Sunderland.

By contrast, ram raid and associated terms appear to have originated in Tyneside, a fact which is noted by early commentators outside the region, but these terms show little or no continuing association with the north-east or Tyneside, and very little likelihood of future enregisterment as part of Geordie English. Presenting these differences in both a diachronic and a synchronic perspective in a historical dictionary requires that almost all parts of the dictionary entry be pressed into service in conveying as much information as possible. Looking to the future, cases like these also present challenges for the construction of sophisticated search techniques for accessing data in historical dictionaries, to facilitate the identification of different layers of lexis showing the association of various kinds with a particular locality.

Footnotes

1 On the question of the provenance of this dictum see Campbell (Reference Campbell2004: 212–3), Durkin (Reference Durkin2009: 209).

2 For an overview of such work, see Dance (Reference Dance2003) and also Durkin (Reference Durkin2014: 211–13).

3 Although outside the scope of this article, the hybrid use of a modern questionnaire-based survey alongside more traditional quotation evidence in documenting regional use in the United States for the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) provides a valuable point of comparison. On DARE’s methodology see also Cassidy (Reference Cassidy1987), as well as materials at www.daredictionary.com. On the OED’s use of data from EDD see further Durkin (Reference Durkin, Markus, Upton and Heuberger2010a), and on the general challenges for historical lexicographers in analysing and documenting variation see also Durkin (Reference Durkin2012). On how dialect is treated in English dictionaries (including the OED) see Wakelin (Reference Wakelin1987).

4 On the treatment of evidence from Clare in OED and EDD see further Durkin (Reference Durkin and Hickey2010b), in the context of a wider discussion of OED’s handling of non-standard written evidence of various types.

5 On such uses of pet in the north-east of England see Beal et al. (Reference Beal, Burbano-Elizondo and Llamas2012: 95).

6 For discussion see Graue & Layng (Reference Graue and Layng1976).

7 On lass in north-eastern lexis see Beal & Burbano-Elizondo (Reference Beal and Burbano-Elizondo2012).

8 Hinny is in origin a variant form of honey and is a similar term of endearment, with a distribution in Scotland and the north of England.

9 Simon Donald ‘Yakkin' Geordie is mint, pet’, The Guardian, Friday 18 August 2006 (www.theguardian.com/media/2006/aug/18/britishidentityandsociety.localgovernment).

10 It is unclear here whether the author, Anne Billson, envisages the theft as taking place without the aid of a vehicle in her article ‘Labelled for life’, published in The Times [London, England] 23 Mar. 1989: 20. The Times Digital Archive, 1785–2008. Web. Accessed 9 Oct. 2014.

11 Kevin Eason, ‘Police to check every white Escort in theft crackdown’. The Times [London, England] 1 Apr. 1991: 2. The Times Digital Archive, 1785–2008. Web. Accessed 9 Oct. 2014.

12 Peter Davenport, ‘Police gear up to tackle battering ram raid gangs’. The Times [London, England] 31 July 1991: 3. The Times Digital Archive, 1785–2008. Web. Accessed 9 Oct. 2014.

13 ‘Ram-raiders’. The Times [London, England] 15 Aug. 1991: 4. The Times Digital Archive, 1785–2008. Web. Accessed 9 Oct. 2014.

14 Sarah Jane Checkland, ‘Antique trade's calm smashed by raiders stealing to order’. The Times [London, England] 14 Sept. 1991: 5. The Times Digital Archive, 1785–2008. Web. Accessed 9 Oct. 2014.

15 See for example: Stewart Tendler, Crime Correspondent, ‘Battering ram gang go back for a necklace’. The Times [London, England] 17 July 1990: 1+. The Times Digital Archive, 1785–2008. Web. Accessed 9 Oct. 2014.

16 ‘Crime and the inner city environment’, The Financial Times [London] 16 Sept. 1991: 18. The Financial Times Historical Archive, 1888–2010. Web. Accessed 9 Oct. 2014.

17 P. D. Nicholson, ‘Tyneside jobs are good news’, The Financial Times [London] 21 Sept. 1991: 7. The Financial Times Historical Archive, 1888–2010. Web. Accessed 9 Oct. 2014.

18 ‘More motorists are likely to take the direct route’, The Financial Times [London] 25 Oct. 1991: 5. The Financial Times Historical Archive, 1888–2010. Web. Accessed 9 Oct. 2014.

19 ‘Lessons from the Maxwell collapse’, The Financial Times [London] 19 Dec. 1991: 18. The Financial Times Historical Archive, 1888–2010. Web. Accessed 9 Oct. 2014.

20 Alison Roberts, ‘New words ram-raid linguistic showcase’, The Times [London] 3 Jan. 1992: 5. The Times Digital Archive, 1785–2008. Web. Accessed 9 Oct. 2014.

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