Collins Taak of the Toon: How to Speak Geordie. Sid Waddell

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       THE ENTIRE GEORDIE NATION

      There was a very loud Newcastle rock band in the 1960s called ‘The Entire Sioux Nation’; nobody slept in the entire Toon when the lads were on the go. Dogs howled, workers wakened from bonny dreams cursed and burglars ran home with empty pokes.

      The best way to regard the Geordie Nation is to parallel it with the American Indians: massive hunting and marauding tribes like the Sioux, the Apache and the Comanche. Within each of those proud fierce groups there were regional subdivisions who fought to the death over buffalo killing rights, theft of horses and the odd bit of squaw-pinching. However, though we Geordies talk with pals as though a fight is about to erupt, divvent youse worry. Our patter is merely torrential enthusiasm and we don’t fight foreigners often.

      The Geordie Nation’s heartland is Newcastle, alias The Toon, with its long trading, seafaring and ship building traditions. From Scotswood to Wallsend we have the ancestral home of the Toony Geordies. They are descendants of blue-bonneted keel men; flash guys quick to take the piss out of pit village lads. See a rag and bone man clopping and calling doon Westgate Road and you see a patter merchant, a verbal chancer. Modern Newcastle is the Mecca for Hens and Stags from all over Britain and the chat on the Quayside is all the richer for it. It is also possible to theorise that the number nine shirt worn by the centre forward of Newcastle United is a mythical totem-like symbol. Players like Hughie Gallacher, Jackie Milburn, Malcolm McDonald and Alan Shearer are to the Geordie tribe what Yellow Hand, Crazy Horse, Cochise, and Geronimo were to the American Indians – the peak of our manhood, role models and heroes.

      Travel a few miles north of the Tyne and you find the Pitmatic Geordies: the branch of the tribe who once worked the coal mines round Ashington, Bedlington and Blyth. This lot talk as though they had a mouthful of iron filings and broken glass. I am a proud paid-up member of this branch, being bred in Ashington where my father worked down the pit for 48 years. Though the flash guys live in the Toon, the racy chat of the hard-grafting miners is probably the most vivid seam of Geordie language.

      To the north and west of this branch, in Morpeth and Alnwick, we find the Romany influence in the Gadgie Geordies. Their main business was horse trading and they had many connections across the Pennines with Appleby and Carlisle. Some of their wild blood flows in my veins since I was born in Alnwick and my pipe-smoking granny spoke a lot of hawker/gipsy patter. ‘Deek the gadgie with the radge jugal and the cushty mort.’ TRANSLATION: ‘Look at the man with the mad dog and the comely maiden.’

      Even further west we have the Coonty Geordies, the wealthy self-employed farmers, folk who have tended to look down on the poorer, more collective-minded branches of the tribe who dug the coal, built the ships, caught the fi sh, and manned the boats. These people think ‘sex’ is what the coal is delivered in.

      South of the Tyne and at its mouth we have the Sand Dancer Geordies. Some people regard them as Mackems, but most South Shields folk I know are proud to be called Geordies.

      To the south of Geordieland, in what was once the old county of Durham, lies the land of the Mackems. They are so-called because they say ‘mack’ instead of ‘make’ and ‘tack’ instead of ‘take’. They are enemies of the Geordies, particularly on the football field. But a lot of them in Gateshead and the East Durham pit villages talk like us. So the inter-tribal violence is mostly satirical or symbolic.

      The folk of Teesside are known as Smoggies, because of the rotten smelly fug that hangs like a manky shroud over their polluted river.

      To the north of the Geordies live the Jocks, whose words you will read here because we swiped a lot of them. They are not really wor enemies, because to many Scots ‘a Geordie is just a Jock with his heid kicked in’.

      I mention these other tribes because we Geordies have often defined ourselves as enemies of the lesser breeds south and north of the Rio Grande – the Mighty Tyne. But really, as this book will show once you get to know us, we are deed canny… as lang as we get wor own way!

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