Lost language of Pitmatic gets its lexicon

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From the Guardian: Lost language of Pitmatic gets its lexicon.

A dialect so dense that it held up social reforms has been rescued from obscurity by the publication of its first dictionary.

Thousands of terms used in Pitmatic, the oddly-named argot of north-east miners for more than 150 years, have been compiled through detailed research in archives and interviews with the last generation to talk of kips, corf-batters and arse-loops.

First recorded in Victorian newspapers, the language was part of the intense camaraderie of underground working which excluded even friendly outsiders such as the parliamentary commissioners pressing for better conditions in the pits in 1842.

"The barriers to our intercourse were formidable," they wrote in their report on encountering the Pitmatic dialect. "Numerous mining technicalities, northern provincialisms, peculiar intonation and accents and rapid and indistinct utterance rendered it essential for us to devote time to the study of these peculiarities ere we could translate and write the evidence."

The first Pitmatic dictionary, including pit recollections and analysis of the origins of the dialect’s words, [continue]

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