If you get it, you’ll laugh. If you don’t, you won’t:

Eee, I know what you mean. Shine’s gone off this government faster than gravy off chips, as we say up here in the North, where I authentically am. What t’party needs is a leader who’s reet proper connected with t’working man. In terms of names, we’ll see to that when dog’s in t’barn, as Northerners like me say up here in the North. — “Mandelson: Let’s chat about Keir…”, 29ix25

Well, I laughed anyway. That’s Robert Hutton in The Critic joking about the prime-ministerial ambitions of Andy Burnham, the mayor of Manchester. And I’m wondering about the “In terms of names…” I think it’s there for deliberate contrast. As I’ve endlessly adumbrated in terms of Overlord-of-theÜber-Feral, “in terms of” is an ugly, pretentious piece of bureaucratese that’s keyly characteristic of politicians, lawyers, academics in the humanities, and other core communities of windbags. In short, it’s highly bourgeois.

And I reckon that’s why Hutton put it into his mockery of Burnham, who’s pretending to be reet down-to-earth but can’t help letting his true nature coom through. Whatever his roots, he’s a bourgeois bureaucrat now. If I’m right, then Hutton recognizes the rebarbativity of “in terms of”. Good on ya, Bob. But bad on ya for getting the northern accent wrong. The apostrophe’s in the wrong place: “t’party” and “t’working man” should be “’t party” and “’t working man”, because that northern form of the definite article doesn’t represent the → t’ but that → ’t (in Old English þæt was the neuter form of the definite article, while the masculine and feminine forms were sē and sēo). You can hear the truth in the glottal stop, which is sometimes all that’s left of the original “that”. In fact, that’s what “t’” is generally a bad transcription of — a glottal stop, “ʔ” in phonetic transcription. But in some dialects of northern English, the glottal stop disappears too, so there’s no definite article and English weirdly seems like Latin or Russian or some other language that doesn’t use definite articles.

You can see Mancunian English moving towards no-definite-article with “Shine’s gone off this government…” But the most natural way to read that line is with a glottal stop: “ʔShine’s gone off this government…” If Hutton meant it to be read like that, he’s implicitly recognizing that “t’” is a bad transcription. “T’shine’s gone off…” would sound like “Chine’s gone off…” But no Mancunian would say it like that. Something else that no Mancunian would say is that the Fat Slags are from Newcastle. But that’s a story for another day.

Peri-Performative Post-Scriptum

As is usual with sociology or biology, the story of the northern definite article is much more complicated than a short discussion can cover. And I can’t remember where I read about its true origins and can’t find anything online at the moment. But this supports what I’m saying:

The phenomenon of Definite Article Reduction (DAR) is the realization of the definite article in northern British English dialects in a range of vowel-less forms, usually written t’ in literature. The origin of DAR is assumed to be the assimilation of the initial fricative of the Middle English definite article þe to produce a te form, a sound change recorded for many dialects of Middle English. This article examines the validity of this hypothesis by analysing the distribution of fricative allomorphs in the modern dialects in comparison with the details of the Middle English change. The predicted distribution of fricative forms is not found at most localities, indicating that the development hypothesis is incorrect, but the available data are too scanty to suggest an alternative model. — “The origin of Definite Article Reduction in northern English dialects: evidence from dialect allomorphy, Mark J. Jones in English Language and Linguistics, November 2002