Colloquialisms

Over the past few days I’ve been considering a difficult question. Since my connection’s been yo-yoing, I’ve had time to take another look at one of the novel ideas I had a while back and try to get a bit more written. The place I got stuck is with colloquialisms.

Take, for example, a story based in modern London. If the hero tells somebody to “have a butcher’s” at something, most Londoners or people who live in southern England will understand that he means “have a look”. It’s Cockney rhyming slang, you see: “butcher’s hook” is “look”.

The difficulty lies in the fact that – hopefully – the end-product will not only be read by people who live in that area. Now, there are a lot of British slang words that have become ‘common knowledge’ thanks to world-wide film distribution: criminals calling people ‘slags’ (an insult), ‘bunging’ someone something (throwing it to them), ‘quid’ as money (a quid is a pound Sterling) and so on. The question remains: how to know if a slang term will be understood or if its usage will detract from the reading experience.

I still remember, when I was very young, getting almost all the way through a book with the heroine’s name pronounced incorrectly in my head. She was called Siobhan. Being a kid, I called her ‘Si-oh-ban’, rather than ‘Sher-vaun’, as I should have done. In this particular case, nothing was lost, but with colloquialisms and slang the very meaning of a phrase can be missed or even completely mistaken. At important junctures of a tale, that can be catastrophic.

On the other hand, a bit of local atmosphere can do a lot for a story. Heck, even Dick Van Dyke’s truly appalling Cockney accent in Mary Poppins gave a bit of extra ‘feel’ to the film. So I have this little rule of thumb: if the phrase is something I have never heard in a film or read in a book, I won’t use it unless I can explain it easily in the text. I figure it’s better to be safe than sorry.

Chim chimminy.

[Originally published on www.wordophilia.com]