Snickets and robots
Today’s word, snicket ['snɪkɪt], is a narrow passage between buildings, walls or fences in some parts of northern England. It’s origins are shrouded in mystery.
There are quite a few other words for such passages, including: gennel/ginnel/jennel ['dʒɛnəl, 'dʒɪnəl, 'gɪnəl], vennel, bunnyrun, close, wynd, jitty, alley, alleyway, passage, passageway, entry, lane, laneway, twitten and twitchel.
Do you have any others?
Source: languagehat
I’m listening to Fry’s English Delight while writing this and just discovered that traffic lights are called robot in South Africa.
An alley is a ‘jigger’ in Liverpool which may be dated slang as I’ve never heard it?
I know the little narrow cross-streets are called dwarsstraten (sing. dwarsstraat) in Dutch: the dwars = (a)cross is, I assume, related to (a)thwart.
I learned about robots some 15 years back at a conference when I was going to cross a street with some South African friends and one of them warned me (in her SA English accent): “Wohttch the rowbohtt!” I couldn’t see a robot anywhere in sight and had no idea what I was supposed to watch, until she explained to me she meant the pedestrian crossing sign across the way.
I grew up in the rural countryside so we didn’t have alleyways between houses because our next neighbour would be probably over half a mile away across the next field. The roads which are just glorified lanes were originally called ‘droves’ where farmers used to drove their cattle and livestock to different pasture.
@ Christopher:
Hey, I never thought of the dwars – thwart cognate, but I think you’re right.
A dwarsstraat indeed tends to be smallish, but doesn’t necessarily have to be. The normal word for ‘alley’ in Dutch is steeg, but even there the width may vary from about 1 to, say, 10 metres. A regional term for the same thing is glop.
But these terms all refer to passageways with at least some ‘official’ status (they usually have names). I wouldn’t know of any standard dutch words for haphazard pass-throughs between walls, fences and the like.
In Colchester they’re called folleys.
Nook? Cranny? One of those two means something like that I believe, I forget which. I think it’s nook.