Have you ever used a word or phrase that you thought everyone knew but they didn't?

[CaramelJones]

Prompted by a discussion with a friend. When we first met she kept saying mardy and I had no idea what she meant.

Has anyone experienced similar with a regional word or a term that only your family use? It's making me wonder which regional words I might be using without thinking of it.

Hull = to throw ( Suffolk)

From the East Midlands:
Mardy
Mash (as in "let the tea mash for a bit")
Mither
Jitty - alleyway
Cob - roll, bun
Cotty - Knotty hair
Frit - (frightened, as in "you frit me" or "he was well frit")

Genuinely didn't know any of these words weren't common usage across the UK until I left home for uni and encountered some strange looks/questions 😂

Some that my granddad used to say but I don't hear as much nowadays

Oakey - ice cream
Coggie - swimming costume
Guzgogs - gooseberries

@ChakaKhanfan I would say Tip Top - I think it was actually a make though - like saying 'biro' or 'hoover' .

I'm from the Midlands too. I always recognise @HunterHearstHelmsley and her Black Country sayings on these kinds of threads !

Guessing your mum was Cumbrian @ForkHandler , probably West Cumbria?

A few from where I grew up:

• Bait for lunch, so a bait box is a lunch box (also a NE/ Geordie expression)
• Saying ‘They call her X’ rather than saying ‘Her name is X’
• Saying ‘all over the parish’ to mean all over the place.

I’m in Yorkshire now and have picked up the word ‘mithering’ and sometimes call a packed lunch a ‘pack-up’, and say while instead of until (9 while 5 meaning 9 until 5).

One ex of mine used to say people were being ‘lairy’ - similar to mardy apparently. I was lairy once too often and got dumped 😏

My whole family says mizzle for misty rain; I had no idea it wasn't universal until I was an adult.

Mizzle is a common word in Cornwall, only when I went up north to uni that or realised it wasn't as common else where in the Uk

'Luggy' for knotted hair (Notts).

It's the name of a hill in Shropshire so if you went all round the Wrekin you'd be going the long way round .

Some of these sound like phonetic shortenings of ones I know:

Daft apeth = daft ha’porth = daft halfpenny’s worth

Corsey = causey = causeway

My DF is from Yorkshire and says the word snicket for an alleyway. I didn't realise that was a regional thing until I was giving someone directions few weeks ago and they looked at me rather quizzically.

East Midlands with Yorkshire parents now near London so I know lots of these.

Clarty - food like peanut butter that sticks to the roof of your mouth.
Snicket - like a ginnel
Chops - referring to courage or mettle although I have heard it used to mean gold chains ( South London slang )

Americans like expressions like “ higgedly piggedly”

I've got family from all over so I'm familiar with lots of these. Some of them I thought were common knowledge rather than regional.

This one is common in parts of Scotland (west coast?) but also "cry" intead of call or name - for example "that new teacher - how d'you cry her?" or "the baby's cried Jamie, after his grandfather."

I admit, I spent a year in Tasmania and privately giggled every time someone said "How're you going?" instead of "how are you doing?" or "how's it going?"

I absolutely loved this dialect quiz in the New York Times. The richness of British dialects is incredible, and I love the traces of human behaviour it reveals as communities move for work and take their language with them.

I'm Scottish living in England so this happens regularly. When I first moved down south we had a list of 'scottish words' in the kitchen which was added to whenever my housemates didn't understand me. Ones I remember are:

Oossie: light fluff on dark laundry
Steep: to soak a saucepan over night
Scramble: coins tossed to children before a wedding
And the interchangeablity of why? And how?

My daughter has broken her arm and currently has it in plaster. DH is astonished by people calling it a "pot" He is a native English speaker but not from the UK originally.

Scriking (crying)
Lozzaking - lying down being lazy
Flummoxed - confused
Nesh

You'd mither a nest of rats

@MinglingFlamingo

You beat me to snicket!

I love using terms like that in London because I know a lot of people don’t know them. I’m forever throwing around a “mithering” or “nesh”

In our family, if you got lost when going somewhere we’d say we went “all around the jingering” (pronounced jing-ger-ing)

nobody else seems to know what I’m talking about!

That’s a stookie in Scotland

Sometimes, but usually just chocker.

@mrsmrsjimhopper - mafting is a good one. I moved from East to West Yorkshire and became incomprehensible, I'm not sure I'd ever dare leave the county altogether!

This really made me laugh OP @CaramelJones as I moved down south in 1988 and NOBODY knew what mardy meant!!

I was just going to say this. I was well into adulthood when I realized knots in your hair aren’t officially called lugs.

Gurt

I am in the West Country, and used to speak lots to a team based in stoke on Trent, got quite pally with some of them, and used to have a chit chat. They had no idea what I meant when I used the term gurt 🤣