DIALECT has clearly become a talking point.

The John North column was discussing Evenwood area patter a few weeks ago, discoursed subsequently into Yorkshire and Co Durham and might still have been chewing on tomorrow had not its services been required elsewhere.

Now a new book called "Teisdale en how twas spok'n" has arrived, and you can almost hear Miss Hannah Hauxwell reading it.

Inspired by a long-gone dale headmaster who insisted that their dialect was their heritage, Kathleen Teward began jotting down half-forgotten words and phrases four years ago.

"Out of school and all over the dale the dialect was used by everyone except the parson, the bank managers, the doctors and one or two more," she says and the one or two may have included the Queen Mother, who greatly loved Teesdale.

"The dialect is very fast dying out and only my generation is able to carry it on," says Kathleen, from Middleton-in-Teesdale. "It will die altogether when we're gone."

Her book, getting on for 200 pages, resuscitates many hundreds of words and phrases alphabetically and also includes some of her dialect poems and old family photographs. Unsurprisingly, many appear to have been taken in six feet of snow.

In truth, many of the supposedly endangered species enjoy are thickly populated elsewhere - what, for example, makes her suppose that "flags" is simply Teesdale dialect for paving stones or "glasses" for spectacles? - and there is much else that changes little from dale to dale. Plenty more scumfish in the sea.

Even the Teesdale shepherd's traditional method of counting - yan, tyane, tethera, methera, pip, razer, ceasar, cattera, hoara, dick - would be understood by sheep many a maunder away.

There is still much to intrigue, however, and much previously unheard, not even in the Blackies' at Mickleton. Readers may therefore care to translate the following ten Teesdale dialect terms from the Queen Mother's English into the Queen's. (Answers at the end of the column)

1. Buzzart 2. Fizzog 3. Ham-sam 4. Sark 5. Teng 6. Watter jags 7. Fullock 8. Dozzle 9. Crowdy 10. Brent

* "Teisdale en how twas spok'n," the ideal Christmas present for dales folk and their kin, is available for £9.95 from Kathleen Teward, High Dyke, Middleton-in-Teesdale, Co Durham DL12 0RS (01833 640653) or from Ottakars in Darlington, the Teesdale Mercury, Raby Castle and Cotherstone Post Office. Mrs Teward is also happy to give talks, including her poems.

IT'S the new book season, of course, and we also have the latest whimsical offering from the tireless Ron Davies-Evans in Darlington, for 40 years a Methodist local preacher.

Ron's humorous little selections have raised thousands for charity. This one, Further Reflections, has a foreword by Gadfly - a picture, too, to keep the bairns away from the fire - and will help buy equipment for the opthalmic unit at Darlington Memorial.

It includes a section on newspaper headlines, recently employing the column, the best of which may be: "Something went wrong in jet crash, says expert."

Though it says little for the sub-editor, it may say rather more about the wonderful world of experts. What might a collective noun be?

* Further Reflections costs £3 from Ron Davies-Evams, 165 Hummersknott Avenue, Darlington DL3 8RL or call (01325) 469468.

HOWEVER informed the guess, it was folly for last week's column to suggest that Ernie Reynolds in Wheatley Hill was the most regularly published correspondent in Hear All Sides.

Whilst all our readers matter, there are those who count as well.

Les Wilson in Guisborough, just six letters this year, believes the letter leader to be Miss E A Moralee from Billingham - 69 letters in 1999, 84 the following year, 71 in 2001 and 58, so far, this year.

Pete Winstanley, near Chester-le-Street, kept a record for six weeks, on which basis poor Ernie Reynolds could only manage fourth behind John Young, Hugh Pender and Dave Pascoe. Elizabeth Moralee was fifth, Pete a distant, disappointed sixth.

Unalone, Pete is also disappointed when letters are edited - a euphemism, meaning cut - though he tends to keep his counsel.

"I happened to hear a remark, attributed to Enoch Powell, that complaining about the press is as futile as complaining about the weather."

The chap who modulates Hear All Sides, capital Letters, may have something to say later.

BACK to local terms, and another reader wonders whatever happened to the word "Binger" - entirely new in the column's vernacular.

"As a 14-year-old rivet catcher in the shipyard you had to smoke or be considered most unusual," he writes.

"You'd never smoke a whole cigarette at one go, so it was nipped and the other half put back in the packet.

"It was called a binger and everyone knew what it meant. If someone asked you for a fag and you refused, they'd say 'Well, gizza binger, then'."

Our smoking gun wonders if anyone still uses the term. He is, of course, Mr Ernie Reynolds from Wheatley Hill.

LAST week's column thanked retired teacher Don Wilson in Durham for his contributions over the years - often on the back of Marilyn Monroe postcards.

His own note of thanks comes on the reverse of a cardboard cut-out of the Creation of Adam by Michelangelo - the postman probably never noticed - and also includes two little puzzles.

Change "Army" to "Navy" in eight moves and "Wheat" to "Bread" in seven moves, each time changing just one letter and still forming a recognised word.

Since it is true that man shall not live by bread alone, the answers to that one next time.

REVIEWING a year in the life of the Teesdale Mercury, we also noted last week that, by using a magnet, the bairns of Cockfield had discovered a way of switching the new street lights on and off.

Aubrey Adamson, now in Birdsall near Malton, rings to suggest that mischief and Cockfield kids are old acquaintances.

Born and brought up in those parts getting on 70 years ago - "If I stand on top of Blakey Ridge I can just about see Co Durham," he says, wistfully - he recalls a new Vicar of Cockfield placing a notice beneath his apple trees.

"Please do not take the fruit. It is needed for the harvest."

The following morning the fruit trees were bare and the good Vicar's notice replaced by another, in rather less elegant handwriting.

"All is safely gathered in," it said.

...and finally, just about the most talked about item in this year's columns has been the dusty reprise of First Aid in English, the junior school grammar crammer upon which many of us were weaned.

Its best remembered section was on collective nouns - a baren of mules, a wisp of snipe, a watch of nightingales - a theme embraced in a new book of daft little things which hardly anyone knows which was reviewed in one of the literary supplements at the weekend.

Unfortunately, we've lost the cutting, a particular disappointment because - unlike First Aid in English - it offered a rather splendid collective noun for cobblers.

Whatever it was, it definitely wasn't a load.

www.thisisthenortheast.co.uk/ news/gadfly.htm