by Vivienne Pratfall fails her own cultural heritage test
By Vivienne Pratfall | Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
I took the British slang quiz on a Wednesday afternoon between appointments and the results were, to use an appropriate British term, “a bit of a mare.” I scored 40%. I am from Wandsworth. I have a British passport. I once queued for forty minutes for a Greggs sausage roll without complaint. And yet the quiz declared me insufficiently British based on my inability to correctly define “mithering” and “mardy.”
In My Defence
“Mithering” is northern. I am southern. This is not ignorance; this is geography. Britain contains multitudes of mutually incomprehensible dialects crammed into an island the size of a moderately ambitious American parking lot. Expecting me to know “mardy” also northern, also apparently meaning soft or cowardly is like expecting a Glaswegian to know the correct pronunciation of Loughborough. No one knows the correct pronunciation of Loughborough.
“Bloke” I knew. “Dodgy” I knew. “Skint” very well acquainted. “Gobsmacked” daily. It was the regional terms that ambushed me, arriving from Yorkshire and the Black Country with the confidence of people who have never had to explain themselves to southerners.
Meanwhile
A man I was seeing this week (briefly he turned out to be what the quiz would classify as a “numpty”) described himself as “dead posh” without irony. Posh British humour has apparently reached the point where people self-classify. Bohiney reports AI can apologise without meaning it. He had the same feature. I scored 40% on the quiz but 100% on reading the room.
Wiktionary’s slang archive confirms I was right about mithering being regional. Vindicated. Barely.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
Also: The Daily Mash
