Friday, October 30, 2009

Brummie Alphabet

Language warning. The easily offended will be. Stop reading now.

Correspondence in the Guardian this week has spoken of the non-phonetic alphabet. It begins with:

A for horses
B for lamb

I recall my Dad telling me the RAF used this during the war years but could never remember much of it. So a few years after I started going to pubs I sat down with some drinking friends and we devised the Brummie alphabet. It's not that clean. Went a bit like this:

A for 'orses
B for lamb
C for miles
D for kate
E for brick
F for vescent
G force
H for train
I for tower
L for leather
M for cream sherry
N for the moor
O for a thousand tongues
P for ages
Q for tickets
R for Askey
S for Rantzen
T for dentures
U for cough
V for Las Vegas
W for quits
X for breakfast
Y for biscuits
Z for bollocks

All of them work (say them quickly) except for the last one which had that wonderful Brummie resignation about it that said that things don't work out, shouldn't work out and sometimes you just have to say bollocks.

2 comments:

Kathryn said...

Y for daughter, surely! V for Espana?
But thanks for solving P, which has baffled us for many a year

Mike Peatman said...

M for cream sherry took me a moment. Must be getting old