Of Combinets and Trattles and Cuddle-Me-Buff

Dictionary of American Regional English by Frederic G. Cassidy, Chief Editor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985. 903 pages. $60.00.

A friend once asked me to explain a word his mother had used. She lived in a little village in the industrial Midlands of England: Sutton-in-Ashfield. His father had recently retired from coal mining, and, being far away and anxious about how his parents would get along in their tiny cottage, he had called, urging his mother to purchase a TV (this was in 1969). She replied that they could not “thirl” one.