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Why...

... do my forty- and fifty-somethings see a few flakes of snow and start cancelling everything days ahead when my sixty-, seventy-, eighty-, ninety- and even hundred-and-somethings wrap up, put on their boots and get on with it? When did we get so nesh?

Comments

  • School is closed -but I got to go to the Coffee Drop in at Church, then a Care Home communion - which Bob described as "taking his wife out for a morning of drinking and singing"!!

    what is 'nesh'?

  • My point precisely!

    Nesh = soft, wussy (not that I know how to spell wuss or wussy). It's a northern-ish expression I think.

  • Would you believe the word has its own Wikipedia entry? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nesh And it sneaked into more general usage by cropping up in 'The Full Monty'

  • When used in the typing pool at Dibley District Council, nesh seemed particularly to describe softness/wussiness in relation to matters of temperature (i.e. someone who always suffered from the cold).

    Other terms I only ever encountered in the typing pool were "having a gleg" (at something) and "sticking your sneck in" (other people's business). Whether this term is very localised to Dibley and district, or whether it was a 19th century import with workers relocating from the North East is a question beyond my etymological powers.

  • Thanks Andy - not come across either of those here. Maybe it is a North Dibley sub-dialect? My understanding is that there are three variations on the local accent and if you are a true Dibleyite (Dibleyonian?) you can tell if a person's ancestry was North East England, Western Scotland or indigenous.

  • Dibbler?

  • Times Cryptic Crossword this week had a clue which required the word NESH [clued as 'feeble' ] to form part of the answer!! So thanks to this blog, I could fill it in. Ta!

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