As a child, I moved around the country a fair bit – my Dad worked (and still works, indeed) for the highways department, and the trouble with civil service jobs is that promotions don’t happen very often – it’s often easier to move 300 miles across the country to a job than wait for the one directly above you to open up. So, we did, several times.

Moving around as a child can be pretty traumatic – leaving your friends behind, losing your beloved bedroom (complete with Transformers wallpaper) and moving into an unfamiliar place are all experiences that no child would really choose to go through.

The worst problem, though, is one of language. Now, in theory, everyone in this country speaks the same language (apart from the Geordies, but they’re just a bit special so we’ll ignore them) – English. But we all know this isn’t entirely true. Regional dialects spring up – hence the Great Barmcake/Bap/Muffin Wars of 1843, for example – and this is nowhere more profoundly noticable than in the school playground.

The issue is that, even if you look like you fit in at school (and God knows, I never did), the moment you open your mouth and exclaim “Wow, that’s skill!” the entire playground falls silent and looks at you as if you’re speaking martian.

“You know. Skill. Like, good. Brill.”
“You mean… Wicked?”
“Er, yeah. Wicked!”

And everyone points and laughs at you and you feel very, very stupid indeed.

What is even worse, though, is when a phrase from one part of the country turns out to mean something completely different somewhere else:

“Miss! Kieran’s got a benny on!”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Kieran, Miss! He’s got a right benny on!”
“I won’t have that sort of language in my class. Go and stand in the corridor.”

Of course, it turns out that, in that part of the country, the phrase for “having a tantrum” was “throwing a mardy”. And “having a benny on” meant something very, very different indeed, and probably wasn’t something you should be saying in front of teachers.

Is it any wonder, then, that I’ve ended up the scarred and fractured individual I am today, having had to edure a childhood of inadvertantly saying to people “Kieran’s got an throbbing great stiffy and is waving it around in the playground at everyone!”. Childhood, eh. Precious memories.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 13th, 2005 at 5:54 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.