Doctors get guide to Yorkshire slang
09 October 2004
LONDON: Help is at hand for foreign doctors working in Yorkshire whose patients complain of sore “lugholes” or say they’re feeling “jiggered” and can’t stop “gipping”.
Health officials in Doncaster, South Yorkshire have compiled a guide of local dialect and slang to help a group of seven Austrian doctors – all fluent English speakers – better understand their sometimes thickly accented patients.
“We recruited these doctors because of a shortage in Britain and though they all speak very good English they’ve struggled with the local dialect,” health authority spokesman Ian Carpenter said on Friday.
“The guide includes some terms that are quite vulgar, but the doctors have found it very useful and it’s also helped them integrate into life in the area,” he added.
The Austrians, among the thousands of recent overseas recruits into Britain’s National Health Service, will now know that “lugholes” are ears, feeling “jiggered” means exhausted and “gipping” is vomiting.
Other terms include “doofer” for penis, “tackle” for testicles and “popped his clogs” for dead.
“We’re looking to hire more doctors from Spain so the guide will be all ready to help them too,” Carpenter said.
I had a friend who moved to Yorkshire who became convinced ‘Nobdy’ was a real person known to everyone but him. He kept thinking he’d just missed seeing him.
For speakers of ‘Yorkshire English as a Foreign Language’ that’s pronounced, ‘Nobdee’ and translated as ‘Nobody’ - as in “Who called while I was out?” “Nobdy!” and “Who are you waiting here for?” “Nobdy!”
Plus I ought to mention, lots of us quaint english folk use ‘doofer’ for all sorts of things we can’t think of a more appropriate term for so please don’t automatically assume we’re all talking about willies!
Of course, there’s every chance we are - you can’t talk about the weather all the time, can you?
Perhaps I should change my sig: “I whistle by ear but I fiddle with my doofer”???
I live just a stones throw from Yorkshire - I can see a large chunk of it from my window - and twenty miles from Doncaster,or Donny as it is called around here.When first I came to live here it took me months to figure out what the people around me were talking about! I had just about got the hang of it and then I met my first Geordie (Newcastle ) person.That was like a different language altogether!!
