The Icelandic novelist Jón Kalman Stefánsson writes of fishermen speaking ‘coddish’ far out into the North Atlantic; the miners working the Great Northern Coalfield in England’s north-east developed a dialect known as ‘Pitmatical’ or ‘yakka’, so dense it proved incomprehensible to Victorian parliamentary commissioners seeking to improve conditions in the mines in the 1840s. The name ‘Pitmatical’ was originally chosen to echo ‘mathematical’, and thereby emphasize the craft and skilful precision of the colliers. Such super-specific argots are born of lives lived long – and laboured hard – on
...more
