Quiz!

OK, tell me this: can you translate the following conversation, in a language that you almost certainly speak?

Jon do?
A dee nah. 

Answer after the fold.

They call it

I noticed a thing the other day. It's a thing I've noticed about the Northeast (English) dialect before (specifically, I've noticed it in the Ashington dialect), but then I heard someone from Sheffield do it too, so maybe it's more widespread in the north.

What I noticed was that where I would say

It's called...

some people would say

They call it...

The exact context was that on Pointless, a contestant was trying to think of Adam Sandler films. He was trying to think of 50 First Dates, though he thought it was called 42 Dates, and he said

There's one, they call it 42 Dates.

This is not a part of my dialect at all, despite having lived in the north east most of my life, and it's sufficiently salient for me to be blogging about, but it's not unusual. I've also heard people introducing a character to the discourse who needs to be contextualised like this:

Margaret's son, I think they call him Michael, works in Asda now. 

For me, they call him has to have a sort of habitual meaning (the action happens habitually, on many separate occasions). To get the stative interpretation (he is in a state of being called Michael) I need to say He is called, where the verb is passive and the subject the person in question. But for these speakers, they call him, with an active verb with generic subject they, can have the stative reading.

Interestingly, it is always they as the subject, never people or any other subject meaning 'everyone in general'. This suggests that it's a fixed expression, they call NP (or perhaps it has to be a pronoun, though I think not), with they an impersonal pronoun like one.

Writer's retreat

I'm in Alnmouth, on the Northumberland coast. It's a lovely village, set at the mouth of the river Aln (I know - lucky coincidence with the name!).

It's been lovely weather since I got here yesterday too, considering it's still March and therefore technically winter, as you can see from this photo I took this morning:

I've been enjoying walks on the beach, I've popped into the local village store for some kippers for my breakfast, and I'm staying in an adorable little cottage (it really is tiny - just two rooms plus an en suite, but they've done such a good job of planning it that it doesn't feel cramped at all, and I've got a nice outside area to sit in the sun in.

But don't I have a PhD thesis to write? Why yes, I do - and that's the beauty of it. I've come here to write. I'm getting away from it all. I've brought my laptop and a few papers and things that I need, and the idea is to write as much as I can without the distractions of work. I've set a goal to write at least 2000 words a day, and I've done that yesterday (when I arrived) and today. I feel good about that. I'm actually really enjoying it and not finding the writing too hard - I don't, once I actually get going; it's the getting going that's hard. I don't want to get too complacent in case I find it gets suddenly much harder later in the week, but I'm hoping that I can write a decent chapter's worth while I'm here (14,000+ words, if I stick to the 2000 words a day goal), and that'll make a nice dent in what I've got left to do.