...
>>>>>You keep her in a dungeon too? Man, that's going to be one maladjusted kid some day! I'd sleep with one eye open if I were you. ;-)
>>>>
>>>>Why? It never did ME any harm! And I keep my great grandmother down there for company!
>>>
>>>Sure, but that was then. Why, when I was a kid;
>>>
>>>I had to get up in the morning, at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill and pay millowner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our dad would kill us and dance about on our graves, singing Hallelujah!
>>
>>lol Great, and almost perfect. It's "... pay t'millowner" (t' = Yorkshire for "the")
>
>Sorry, just copied from the Python sketch, and wasn't no "t'" on millowner, but you're probably right about how it should have been said.


Fffff! The Yorshire "t'" is so subtle as to be almost undistinguishable. Perhaps the transcriber missed it. It's a common expression in England "There's trouble at t'mill" meaning "There's an argument going on", referring back to the days of the luddites who smashed new automated eqpt., at the start of the Industrial Revolution.

Come to think of it, it should have been: "... down t'mill and pay t'millowner ..." :-)

People also extend this to today for a laugh: "Can ah goor on t'internet for t'look someat up?"

Take the old saw, and put it in Yorkshire talk:

"A bird in t'and is worth two in t' bush"

cf. Lancashire:

"A bird i'th'and is worth two in t' bush""

>
>>Did you not rub gravel in your heads for breakfast then? :-)
>
>Not in the sketch, but deserves to be. In fact though, we had to eat half a handful of freezing cold grubble.

Could have sworn I've heard that in at least ONE version of the sketch. Perhaps on "The Secret Policeman's Ball" live version on stage?