A lady from Bray is annoyed about the recent acquisition of the DART accent by her daughter. When the girl's mother is not in she's ite, and the deathtrap at Loughlinstown Hospital is known to her as rindabite. And worse, says my correspondent, she says I'm beholding to you.
Hold hard there, missus. I'm with you all the way about the DART speak, but beholding, is a venerable old word. Yes, I suppose it started life as a spelling error, when used instead of the past participle beholden, obliged. But somebody very literate indeed put the stamp of authority on the corrupted spelling, or grammatical error, or whatever, a long time ago. I came across this: `I am beholding to you for your sweet music this last night.' No, not an actress bidding good morrow to a bishop, but Simonides talking to Pericles in Shakespeare's play.
In all probability the Bray lassie is merely being genteel in saying beholding, but the dialect dictionaries tell me the word is alive and well across the water, from Leicestershire to Somerset, where they also have the lovely noun, beholdingness, obligation.
Dr Vincent McMahon practises the healing art in Carbonear, Newfoundland. He has sent me a few words he overheard in his surgery recently. A woman described her husband as a crackawley. This is the Irish craicealai, from English dialect cracked, mad. Like the vast number of words of Irish origin one finds in Newfoundland English, it must have come with the cod fishermen of the southeast two centuries ago, many of whom found life easier in Talamh an Eisc, the Fishing Ground, not the Land of Fish, as I've said before. Strange that Dineen doesn't have the word. O Donaill does.
The language of Newfoundland has its charming old euphemisms. "I am a victim of the costive bowel," elderly patients have told Dr McMahon, when they meant they were constipated. And some old plurals have survived, either from south-east Wexford English or from the dialects of southern England. A man complained of having six nestes of waspes near his house. They used to have dugges and caudes south of Rosslare, not dogs and cats. An old man from Carne once told me that he had burned a new pair of shoon in the ashen. Chaucer wouldn't have raised an eyebrow. Neither, I fancy, would some of Vincent McMahon's patients. I am beholding to him.