Ulster Word Of The Day

A few posts ago I was talking about my boarding school days in N. Ireland and mentioned having had potato bread for Sunday breakfast with lashings of butter. Yum.

I then said that it was known as 'fadge' in those parts and this led to a few comments, even from people in other parts of the UK, that they'd never heard of this word.

I'm sure most countries have regional words that are pretty much unknown outside their geographical area but I'd have to think that, given the long and colourful linguistic history of our little islands, the UK is up there with the best of them.

So with this in mind and shamelessly nicking the idea from expat Sarah over in Oklahoma who does a Brit Word of the Day for her many hundreds of followers, I thought I'd start presenting words pretty much unique to N. Ireland (or Ulster to give it the slightly shorter title of UWOTD).  Who knows, these posts may be of some historical value in centuries to come when they read our blogs to see what we were like back in 2009.  God help them if they use my blog as a guide !!

Another good reason for starting this today is that I've just been chatting online with my fav cousin, Breid, who lives over in N. Ireland and she used a word to describe me that I'd not heard for many years (??) and this sealed the fate of my UWOTD post.  

So I'm starting with 'dote' which you may think you know but probably not in the way it's used in Ulster. And that's another thing.  I may post words here that you HAVE heard before but that are used in a completely different way in N. Ireland. This being one of them.

Dote : usually a positive descriptive word for a baby or a small child.  

As in "oh he's a wee dote" meaning something like a darling or a cutie. It's a variation of  "oh he's a wee pet" and being that it's about a baby or a small child, always seems to have 'wee' in front of it.

Stop giggling. 

And so in that case, why was a 56 year old man called a dote just a few minutes ago ?  

Well anyone who knows me shouldn't have to ask !!!