Blog

‘Spelk’. It’s one of the thousands of words that I store in my internal library – and when the need arises, it is the word I would naturally elect to use.

The people of the town from which I hail use that word; it’s used all over north-eastern England and much of Scotland (though it’s ‘skelf’ in Glasgow).

When I started working at a global publishing house in London in 1987, despite my knowing that ‘splinter’ and ‘spelk’ were one and the same – and always knowing that ‘spelk’ and ‘splinter’ had the same meaning – my exclusively southern-born colleagues knew only of ‘splinter’, and even went so far as to suggest that I was some sort of inferior being, vocabulary-wise.

In the act of writing this blog, MS Word has come to the same conclusion, producing an angry red wiggle beneath the word ‘spelk’.

I couldn’t disagree more vehemently. I will defend colloquialisms to the death.

When I rebutted my erstwhile colleague’s oblique remarks and looked up ‘spelk’ in the OED, its pedigree was found to be impeccable: Old English spelc, spilc; related to Old Norse spelkur.

So – and how cool is this – I speak TWO English languages – and I speak them simultaneously. It seems my Oxbridge-educated colleagues speak only one.

I’m bilingual. In English.