Weird Vocabulary with Amy
Oct. 25th, 2018 06:43 pmThe poll says the next family trivia I tell you should be 'Top Three Injuries My Brother Didn't Die Of', but off the back of 'agistment', let me tell you about vocabulary I am baffled to find isn't universal.
Agistment, to agist: Aus/NZ - to rent out paddocks (that is, fields) for someone else's horses or stock. The Macquarie Dictionary indicates that the subject of agist is the person taking money, but both my family idiom and![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kayloulee's rural idiom include the usage 'I agist my horse on Bob's paddock' (where Bob receives the money), and 'illegal agistment' as the process of grazing your horse somewhere without paying for it. This term does not seem to be in use at all in US English.
Its origins are high medieval English law: the forest charter of 1217 (which has more clauses still in effect than the Magna Carta, according to an exhibit I saw in Hereford last year) guarantees to the peasantry the rights of agistment, pannage, estover and turbary on royal forest land. Pannage is pasture for pigs, estover collecting of wood, and turbary the cutting of turf for fires. These rights were not ones that had to be paid for, and the point was you couldn't be charged with poaching for exercising them. My landlady in Darkest Lancashire thinks that some aspects of these rights remain - she's pretty sure you can collect firewood on the duke's estate.
Wikipedia thinks in current legal usage in England agistment can refer to the contract of pasture for someone else's animals or the proceeds therefrom, but evidence suggests that no one uses the term in actual practice.
I'm particularly delighted with this one, because it's an example of a linguistic phenomenon that is evident in Quebeçois, and sometimes in American English, and I believe in South American spanishes, but is rarely obvious in Aus/NZ English: the colonial dialect preserves and adapts an archaic term that the source language no longer uses, or uses in a more restrictive sense.
Manchester, n: This one I discovered in a conversation with my then-boyfriend shortly after moving to Europe. In Australian English, Manchester is the category of soft homewares that includes sheets and towels and pillows. It is roughly cognate with 'linens', I think, and is more likely to be found describing shop sections or goods for sale than items in your home. A department store has a Manchester Section. The sheets and towels you buy there will go home into your linen closet.
I gather that the logic of this, as a description for fabric homewares, is much the same as generalising 'linens' to all things in the sheets-and-towels cupboard: Mancester was a major producer of cotton, and thus 'manchester ware' would include sheets, towels, pillowslips, etc (and somehow the pillows themselves have been bundled in with this).
To flipe, v: This verb, which according to the OED has been obsolete since the 1920s but is alive and well in my family, describes the correct way to fold socks. Firstly, let me show you the correct way to fold socks.
( The correct way to fold socks, in pictures )
Congratulations, you have fliped a sock.
My family use this word for no other manouvre than folding socks. That's it. It is a special sock-folding word. I'm not honestly sure of the spelling, because until the internet I had no reason to write it down.
I have looked it up in the OED, and its origin appears to by archaic English 'flype', meaning to turn inside-out, a proceeding that could apply to sleeves and bags and other such things. It went obsolete in the 1920s, although given how rarely people write about inside-out-folding of clothes, it may have been in use for some time after the OED last records it. You could, for instance, flype a sleeve of a shirt when ironing the front and back of the shirt, so that it sits flatter. (I can't tell if my instant association of 'flype sleeve' with that specific ironing task means my mother did, at one point, use the verb for shirts, or if that's just association on my part.)
As far as I can tell, my use of this linguistic fossil is a product of my mother having been raised by her grandmother, who was a young woman in the late 19th century. I, in the late 20th century, was taught to rigorously flipe my socks because my great-grandmother fliped hers.
I discovered this wasn't a normal word only when I moved in withkayloulee, although we had to cross-check with a housemate in case it was an Australian word her Canadian mum didn't know. My family does have a few other weird/archaic household vocab quirks, and certainly some old fashioned housekeeping habits. I hospital-corner my bed, for instance, and completely baffled a 60-something y old of my acquaintance by attempting to hospital corner a tablecloth the other week.
This has been weird vocabulary with Amy. You also now know how to correctly fold socks.
Agistment, to agist: Aus/NZ - to rent out paddocks (that is, fields) for someone else's horses or stock. The Macquarie Dictionary indicates that the subject of agist is the person taking money, but both my family idiom and
kayloulee's rural idiom include the usage 'I agist my horse on Bob's paddock' (where Bob receives the money), and 'illegal agistment' as the process of grazing your horse somewhere without paying for it. This term does not seem to be in use at all in US English.Its origins are high medieval English law: the forest charter of 1217 (which has more clauses still in effect than the Magna Carta, according to an exhibit I saw in Hereford last year) guarantees to the peasantry the rights of agistment, pannage, estover and turbary on royal forest land. Pannage is pasture for pigs, estover collecting of wood, and turbary the cutting of turf for fires. These rights were not ones that had to be paid for, and the point was you couldn't be charged with poaching for exercising them. My landlady in Darkest Lancashire thinks that some aspects of these rights remain - she's pretty sure you can collect firewood on the duke's estate.
Wikipedia thinks in current legal usage in England agistment can refer to the contract of pasture for someone else's animals or the proceeds therefrom, but evidence suggests that no one uses the term in actual practice.
I'm particularly delighted with this one, because it's an example of a linguistic phenomenon that is evident in Quebeçois, and sometimes in American English, and I believe in South American spanishes, but is rarely obvious in Aus/NZ English: the colonial dialect preserves and adapts an archaic term that the source language no longer uses, or uses in a more restrictive sense.
Manchester, n: This one I discovered in a conversation with my then-boyfriend shortly after moving to Europe. In Australian English, Manchester is the category of soft homewares that includes sheets and towels and pillows. It is roughly cognate with 'linens', I think, and is more likely to be found describing shop sections or goods for sale than items in your home. A department store has a Manchester Section. The sheets and towels you buy there will go home into your linen closet.
I gather that the logic of this, as a description for fabric homewares, is much the same as generalising 'linens' to all things in the sheets-and-towels cupboard: Mancester was a major producer of cotton, and thus 'manchester ware' would include sheets, towels, pillowslips, etc (and somehow the pillows themselves have been bundled in with this).
To flipe, v: This verb, which according to the OED has been obsolete since the 1920s but is alive and well in my family, describes the correct way to fold socks. Firstly, let me show you the correct way to fold socks.
( The correct way to fold socks, in pictures )
Congratulations, you have fliped a sock.
My family use this word for no other manouvre than folding socks. That's it. It is a special sock-folding word. I'm not honestly sure of the spelling, because until the internet I had no reason to write it down.
I have looked it up in the OED, and its origin appears to by archaic English 'flype', meaning to turn inside-out, a proceeding that could apply to sleeves and bags and other such things. It went obsolete in the 1920s, although given how rarely people write about inside-out-folding of clothes, it may have been in use for some time after the OED last records it. You could, for instance, flype a sleeve of a shirt when ironing the front and back of the shirt, so that it sits flatter. (I can't tell if my instant association of 'flype sleeve' with that specific ironing task means my mother did, at one point, use the verb for shirts, or if that's just association on my part.)
As far as I can tell, my use of this linguistic fossil is a product of my mother having been raised by her grandmother, who was a young woman in the late 19th century. I, in the late 20th century, was taught to rigorously flipe my socks because my great-grandmother fliped hers.
I discovered this wasn't a normal word only when I moved in with
kayloulee, although we had to cross-check with a housemate in case it was an Australian word her Canadian mum didn't know. My family does have a few other weird/archaic household vocab quirks, and certainly some old fashioned housekeeping habits. I hospital-corner my bed, for instance, and completely baffled a 60-something y old of my acquaintance by attempting to hospital corner a tablecloth the other week. This has been weird vocabulary with Amy. You also now know how to correctly fold socks.