More on dialect

This post was sparked off by the title of tradgardmastare’s post about finding an antidote to flitting between different projects.

https://tradgardland.blogspot.com/2020/05/an-antidote-to-extreme-flitting.html?m=1

Flitting was a word that was more common when I was growing up. I’ve rarely heard it since leaving home but that’s probably because I’ve spent the vast  majority of my adult life in the south east of England. I might be staying the bleeding obvious here, so apologies for that, but I will hide behind the defence that it’s best not to assume everyone knows what I’m writing  about.

To flit simply means to move. And tradgardmastare was using it in a way derived from this meaning although it seems to have the connotation of making small, even ‘trivial’* movements from one thing to another. You can almost hear the alliteration with ‘flutter’ as in butterfly wings fluttering as it flits from flower to flower. It also triggers thoughts of flying, alliteration apparently involved again. You often hear or see ‘flit’ being used in this way. But you rarely see it (or I rarely see or hear it) in the wider sense of ‘to move’. Like a lot of dialect words, it seems to have fallen by the wayside.

* Incidentally I don’t think the said esteemed blogger’s movement from one hobby project to another is trivial. No more so than any of us sitting down to mega painting sessions churning out units in a singleminded drive to ‘complete a project’. And neither do I think he needs an antidote for it.

Now when I was a kid (and note I don’t use the classic ‘Northern’ phrase of ‘when I were a lad’, simply because that wasn’t how people from that part of northern Lincolnshire spoke) I intuitively understood that ‘flit’ was not standard English.  I never heard a teacher or any authority figure use the term. What I didn’t understand was that flit had a wider meaning of ‘move’**. You see in my world (working class, council estate) I associated ‘flit’ with the phrase “they’ve done a flit. They owed the council weeks and weeks of rent”. Often these flits seemed to be done by “moonlight” to add to the sense of adventure around the miscreants being tutted about. So in my mind it was associated with one very narrow sense of moving. I assumed it was ‘slang’ and ‘common’ in the pejorative sense.

Now many years later Rouva Nundanket and I took to watching Scandi Noir dramas on BBC4, her occasionally remembering the odd phrase and enjoying the grey interiors (only joking, I like them too) and me so I can indulge my biased view that everything is done better in those countries. In one detective series I thought I heard the word ‘flit’ and saw the associated text which contained ‘move’ or ‘moved’ and a quick check (yes that does mean move). Subsequent checks revealed that something like ‘at flytte’ or variants of it means the same thing in all Scandinavian languages. So a word with a common Norse root and a proper word, albeit one that, in the way of many English words which have synonyms, has come to have a specific narrower usage.

Latest edition of my ECW Rules?

I guess the word ‘flit’ was/is also widespread across the rest of the old Danelaw and parts of Scotland. I’d be interested to hear if this is the case and if it’s still in usage. And are there any uses that don’t have negative connotations?


** though not in an emotional sense: ‘that song really flitted me’ is not a phrase I’ve ever come across.
*** I also wonder if the word is linked with the words to flee and flight - when they are fleeing are our little routers engaging in a variant of ‘flitting’ (moonlit or otherwise)?

Late edit: Interesting feedback. So 'flit' in the sense of moving house is not just northern English but more widespread. I'd be interested if anyone in the west of the country, Wales or in Scotland or even farther afield, was familiar with the term, and if it was used in any other way.