About a year ago, whilst looking rather casually through the preface
to an earlier book, A Measured Life (1994), I came upon this
sentence: ‘You could write a book about the English character, warts
and all, simply by putting together in thematic groups the traditional
cant expressions that lubricate our daily life’.
I had entirely forgotten the idea, and did not even remember it
throughout the year in which the present book was being written.
Obviously, it had been lying dormant somewhere at the back of the
mind. During that year, one part of the suggestion proved ill-judged:
such a task is not at all a ‘simple putting together’. It may begin in
that way but it soon branches into its own complexities.
One thing was clear from the start. Such a book would best begin
with the daily, conventional speech habits of a particular people in
time and place, not with a scouring of dictionaries and linguistic
records. If the examination of idioms, as they were habitually used,
was to be revealing it should be rooted in a known, felt life. For me, that
had to be the daily life of the Northern English working class from the
1930s onwards. So that was where I began; but did not remain.
I soon recovered from memory about one hundred and fifty common
sayings of that period and class. But many, it was plain to see,
were used also by people of other classes. Was there being illustrated
here an aspect of the unity of English culture, a unity we sometimes
claim, readily and with a certain pride, as strong and enduring?
That thought had some validity, but on further examination, not
much. My class-of-birth used some sayings almost uniquely. More
important, whilst they used some sayings they shared with other
groups, they used certain of them more often and with greater stress
than those other groups. Such sayings spoke most directly to them.
Repetition and emphasis became defining characteristics.
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