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“That Word so Fraught with Meaning”:

The History, Cultural Significance and
Current Use of Canny in North East
England
Michael Pearce

To cite this article: Michael Pearce (2013) “That Word so Fraught with Meaning”: The History,
Cultural Significance and Current Use of Canny in North East England, English Studies, 94:5,
562-581, DOI: 10.1080/0013838X.2013.795736

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0013838X.2013.795736

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 English Studies, 2013
Vol. 94, No. 5, 562–581, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0013838X.2013.795736

“That Word so Fraught with Meaning”:

The History, Cultural Significance and
Current Use of Canny in North East
England
Michael Pearce
Downloaded by [Michael Pearce] at 05:52 19 July 2013

Although canny occurs in varieties of English around the world, it is particularly

associated with Scots and Scottish English. But it also has a long, well-attested
(though perhaps less well-known) history as a feature of dialect in North East
England. Indeed, many people both within and beyond the region regard it as a
lexical shibboleth. It is an epithet for the region’s major city (“Canny Newcastle”); it
appears in the titles of traditional songs (“Hi Canny Man, Hoy a Ha’Penny Oot”)
and even in the names of shops and businesses (“Canny Carpet Clean”). According to
the Oxford English Dictionary, the word is not found before the seventeenth century,
having apparently developed from the verb can (“to know how”, “be able”) and/or the
derived Scots noun can (“skill, knowledge”). In the North East canny has acquired an
extensive range of meanings. This article outlines its northern English history,
considers its significance as a cultural keyword and explores its usage in contemporary
speech, literature and online discourse.

Across the Anglophone world, the word canny is widely associated with Scotland.
Indeed, the “canny Scot”, with his (or her) somewhat dour, moralistic demeanour
and penny-pinching approach to financial issues is a component in the complex of
behaviours and characteristics which make up the Scottish national stereotype.1 But
my focus in this article lies a little further to the south. Outwith Scotland, there is
only one part of the English-speaking world where canny has a special status: North
East England.2 One of the strongest claims for the cultural significance of the word

Michael Pearce is affiliated with the University of Sunderland, UK. Email: Mike.Pearce@sunderland.ac.uk
1
Martin, 110.
2
This is a region consisting of the historic counties of Durham and Northumberland, the metropolitan county of
Tyne and Wear (containing the cities of Newcastle-upon-Tyne [hereafter Newcastle] and Sunderland), together

© 2013 Taylor & Francis

 History, Cultural Significance and Current Use of Canny 563

in the North East was made by the steel merchant, antiquarian and English Dialect
Society luminary, Richard Oliver Heslop (author of Northumberland Words: A Glossary
of Words Used in the County of Northumberland and on the Tyneside). In his essay on
“Canny” in the April 1889 edition of the journal North-Country Lore and Legend,
Heslop acknowledges the “trans-Tuedian” (that is, Scottish) associations that the
word has for many a “Southern Englishman”, but also points out that “in Northum-
berland, the word is of ancient currency, for it is part of the mother-tongue of the
people.”3 What he is suggesting here is that canny is as “native” to North East
England as it is to Scotland, a claim which, though perhaps unusual, is relatively
uncontroversial, given the intertwined histories and population flows between the
two territories and the fact that the Northumbrian dialects and Lowland Scots have
a common ancestor in “the northernmost variety of Old English”, which scholars
refer to as Anglian or the Anglian dialects.4 Consequently, there is a considerable
amount of shared lexis in the vernacular speech of (lowland) Scotland and Northum-
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bria, and canny—like bairn, bonny, gan(g), toon and many others—must be considered
as “English” as it is Scottish.5
Canny has a complex etymology even before it becomes a “North-country catch-
word”.6 The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) suggests that it is derived from the
verb can (in the sense of “to know how, be able”) and/or the derived Scots noun
can (meaning “knowledge, skill”) by addition of the -y suffix.7 An earlier derivative
of can which is semantically related to canny is cunning. The Proto Indo-European
root of can (gen-, gon-, gn-) also gives us know and Scots ken.8

Canny Amongst the Lexicographers

In his essay, Heslop suggests that the word has been ill-served by lexicographers. He
claims that the earliest appearance of canny in an English dictionary is in John Ogilvie’s

with the city of Middlesbrough and its environs. (For an overview of the geographical and social contexts of the
region, see Pearce, “A Perceptual Dialect Map.”) The term “Geordie” is often used as a label for the people and
dialect of the North East, but within the region it is now mainly used in relation to Tyneside, and in particular the
city of Newcastle.
Canny is, of course, present in varieties of English in the north of Ireland, having been introduced by Scottish
immigrants in the seventeenth century. But I have not yet uncovered any evidence to suggest that it has a similar
status there to the one that it has enjoyed in Scotland and North East England.
3
Heslop, “Canny,” 183. Richard Oliver Heslop was not the first to acknowledge the special status of the word in the
North East. In an account of a paper read at a North of England Teachers’ Society meeting in Gateshead in 1848,
the author—a Mr W. Finley—was reported as describing canny as “that shibboleth of the Newcastle dialect—that
word so fraught with meaning.” (Anon., “Canny,” 20–21.)
4
McArthur, 146.
5
For a recent account of the cultural effects of Scottish in-migration to North East England, see Burnett.
6
Palgrave, 8–9.
7
OED, “Canny.”
8
William Holloway (25) offers the most speculative etymology I have found, linking canny to Latin canus, which
he translates as “white, fair.”
 564 M. Pearce
“great” Imperial Dictionary, but he is unhappy with the entry, suggesting that the Scot
Ogilvie defines it in Scottish terms as “‘cautious; prudent; artful; crafty; wary; frugal,’
&c.”.9 This canny, Heslop asserts, “is not our own ‘canny’”. For the people of North-
umberland, the word

has developed a meaning far differing from a rendering that ascribes to it mere
cunning, or craft, or wariness. Here “canny” is an embodiment of all that is
kindly, good, and gentle. The highest compliment that can be paid to any
person is to say that he or she is “canny”. As home expresses the English love of
the fireside, so in Tyneside and Northumberland does “canny” express every
home virtue.10

For Heslop, “our own” canny has no negative connotations at all. On the contrary, it
encapsulates “all that is good and lovable in man or woman”; whether that be beauty of
form, manners or morals. “This Northumberland word is just the simpler English term
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for what we should otherwise have to style in grandiloquent language the highest
human virtues.” Indeed, “to say one is ‘no’ canny’ is to say that he is simply
unhuman.”11 Heslop emphasized these positive adjectival senses for canny a few
years later in his definition in the first volume of Northumberland Words (NW), pub-
lished in 1892, where the meanings are “endeared”; “modest”; “orderly, neat”;
“careful”. In addition, in both the essay and NW, Heslop notes that canny can also
function as an adverb, in expressions such as “Canny, noo, canny!” or “Gan
canny”—that is, go gently.” It also combines with bit or few to indicate “a considerable
portion of anything, a good deal”:

“Aa’ve steudin’ here a canny-bit”—I’ve stood here a considerable time. “He wis a
canny-bit aheed on us”—he was a good way ahead of us. Canny-few, a fair
number. “Was thor mony at the meetin’ the day?” “Wey, a canny-few.”12

The entry on canny in NW was the fullest to appear in a dictionary to that date, but
when Joseph Wright published in 1898 the first volume of that “landmark of
dialect lexicography”, 13 the six-volume English Dialect Dictionary (EDD), the

9
Heslop says that the Imperial Dictionary was published in 1848. However, the version I consulted is from 1854,
while the Oxford History of English Lexicography gives a date of 1850 (Landau, 204).
10
Heslop, “Canny,” 183.
11
Ibid., 184.
12
Heslop, NW, 1: 130–1.
13
Ellis, 358. Joseph Wright’s task was to assemble and edit the vast amounts of material collected by members of
the English Dialect Society (founded in 1873). The six volumes of the dictionary, amounting to some five thousand
pages, were published between 1898 and 1905. In 1895 Heslop wrote to Wright expressing his admiration for the
“heroic exertion” Wright had expended on the task. Also recorded in the letter is Heslop’s wife’s reaction to
Wright’s achievement: “I don’t know how he has done it—what a brave man!” (Considine, 2–3). His triumph
is perhaps all the more remarkable given the fact that Wright, who was born into poverty near Bradford, York-
shire, and had to labour as a child in a quarry and a woollen mill, was illiterate until the age of fifteen. He never-
theless became Professor of Comparative Philology at Oxford University in 1901 (see Holder).
 History, Cultural Significance and Current Use of Canny 565

even lengthier treatment given to canny, extending over a page and a half of
closely printed double columns, revealed some interesting contrasts with the
version of canny in Heslop’s essay and NW. 14 Box 1 contains a summary of the
EDD’s entry, showing the earliest citation for each sense together with evidence
for its distribution in Scotland and England. Interestingly, meanings associated
with shrewdness, prudence and frugality—which Heslop regards as exclusively
Scottish—are recorded for North East England (senses 1 and 4). Conversely,
meanings associated with gentleness and agreeableness, which Heslop implies
are distinctive of “Tyneside and Northumberland”, are identified by Wright as
also occurring north of the border (senses 5, 6 and 8). By associating only positive
meanings with the North East canny, and denying positive meanings for the Scot-
tish canny, Heslop seems to be indulging in a mild form of philological propa-
ganda. He is not alone in this, of course. In response to the sorts of attitudes
expressed by Heslop, the anonymous author of a column entitled “Objectionable
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English” in the Edinburgh-based Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature (17

August 1861) writes that canny

is constantly used in England as a Scotch word, appropriate to a low prudence or

roguish sagacity, which southern people are pleased to attribute to their northern
kinsfolk. Now, if Englishmen feel themselves entitled to use terms of obloquy
regarding the morals of their neighbours, let them do it in correct language
… “canny”, in reality, means gentle, innocent, propitious, and has no connection
whatever with either cunning or prudence.15

“No connection whatever” is pushing it a bit. As senses 1 and 4 in Wright’s defi-

nition show (Box 1), these more “negative” semantic associations are indeed
recorded for Scotland. Both Heslop and the author of “Objectionable” are
shaping the evidence to present a particular version of canny which reflects
their beliefs, attitudes and cultural loyalties. It alerts us to the fact that, in the
case of complex words such as canny, “there is no such thing as a politically
neutral definition.” 16

14
Wright, 1: 507–9.
15
Anon., “Objectionable English.” The author of “Objectionable English” (Chambers’s Journal) would not have
been impressed by Jack Common’s take on the subject. In his autobiographical account of growing up on Tyne-
side in the first quarter of the twentieth century, Common asserts that in Newcastle canny does not have “the
miserable meaning to which the Scots have debased it. … Anybody that is canny is all right, believe me”
(130). The author might also have taken issue with a court-room scene in Pat Barker’s Newcastle-set novel
Another World (1998), in which a witness is describing how on the night in question he had had “a canny
few drinks.” The judge (with the decidedly Scottish name of Lowther) interrupts the local man’s testimony,
stating that he “could attach no meaning to the word ‘canny’ in this context. As far as he was concerned, it
meant shrewd, thrifty or explicable in natural terms” (Barker, 111).
16
Moon, 77.
 566 M. Pearce

Box 1 A Summary of Wright’s Definition of Canny in the EDD17

1. adj. Knowing, sagacious, shrewd; prudent, cautious. (Scotland, 1737: “Canny
chiels carry cloaks when ‘tis clear.”) Aberdeen, Kircudbright, Forfar, Perth,
Ayr, Lanark, Galloway, Northumberland, North, West and East Ridings of
Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Leicestershire.
2. Skilful, dextrous, handy, careful. (Aberdeen, 1768: “Thae auld warld fouks
had wondrous cann / Of herbs, that were baith good for beasts and man, /
And did with care the canny knack impart / Unto their bairns.”) Aberdeen,
Ayr, Lanark, North and East Ridings of Yorkshire, Lincolnshire.
3. Favourable, safe; fortunate, lucky, of good omen, esp. in a superstitious sense.
(Roxburgh, 1807: “This cannie year will mak’ ye braw.”) Aberdeen, Perth,
Fife, Dumbarton, Renfrew, Selkirk, Roxburgh, Galloway.
4. Frugal, saving, moderate, sparing. (Lanarkshire, 1800: “Whate’er he wins, I’ll
Downloaded by [Michael Pearce] at 05:52 19 July 2013

guide with canny care.”) Renfrew, Ayr, Lanark, Galloway, Northumberland,

Cumberland, Yorkshire.
5. Gentle, quiet, steady, careful. (Scotland, 1798: “A canny horse.”) Renfrew,
Ayr, Lothian, Berwick, Galloway, Durham, Cumberland, North and East
Ridings of Yorkshire.
6. Agreeable, pleasant, nice, good; comely, dainty. Applied as a gen. term of
approbation or affection to persons and things. (Yorkshire, 1703: “A
konny thing.”) Aberdeen, Kircudbright, Ayr, Lanark, Selkirk, Galloway,
Northumberland, Durham, Cumberland, Westmoreland, North, East and
West Ridings of Yorkshire, Lancashire, Cheshire, Derbyshire, Lincolnshire,
Leicestershire.
7. Of quantity, time, distance, &c.: considerable, fair. (Northumberland, 1806–
07: “gav him a kick, / An’ a canny bit kind of a fally-o.”) Northumberland,
Durham, Cumberland, Westmoreland, North and East Ridings of Yorkshire,
Lancashire.
8. adv. Gently, carefully, quietly, steadily. (Ayr, 1786: “Speak her fair, / An’
straik her cannie wi’ the hair.”) Aberdeen, Kircudbright, Forfar, Dumbarton,
Renfrew, Ayr, Lanark, Lothian, Northumberland, Cumberland, North
Riding of Yorkshire.
9. Fairly, tolerably. (Westmoreland, “We are canny near home.”) Westmore-
land.

Furthermore, it turns out that Heslop is wrong when he asserts that the first diction-
ary to record canny was the Imperial Dictionary. There are at least three works
pre-dating Ogilvie’s which Heslop knew of and which have canny amongst their head-
words. References to the earliest of these—Francis Grose’s A Provincial Glossary

17
Wright, 1: 507–9. Note also in senses 3 and 8 the alternative spelling which is sometimes encountered.
 History, Cultural Significance and Current Use of Canny 567

(1787) —are scattered throughout NW, yet Heslop does not refer to, either in his
18

article in North-Country Lore and Legend or in his dictionary, Grose’s definition of

canny: “Nice, neat, housewifely, handsome. Newcastle, Northumb. and N”, or of
conny (“Brave, fine, the same as canny. N.”) and kony-thing (a “fine thing; perhaps
canny.”). Heslop also makes no mention of Grose’s section on Northumberland
sayings, which includes this gloss of the phrase “canny Newcastle”:

Canny is [sic] the northern dialect, particularly that of Newcastle; means fine, neat,
clean, handsome &c. This is commonly spoken jocularly to Newcastle-men, as a gird
on them for their partiality to their native town.19

The lack of a direct reference to Grose’s account of canny in Heslop’s work seems
odd, given that Grose’s definition pre-dates the earliest evidence Heslop gives for
canny by some thirty-one years, and by the time Heslop was compiling NW (under
the auspices of the English Dialect Society) it had long been best lexicographical prac-
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tice to track down the earliest known example of the target word. Heslop must also
have been aware of the definition of canny which appeared in John Trotter Brockett’s
Glossary of North Country Words (1825),20 since he quotes from it in the essay and in
NW. Finally, Heslop also fails to mention—in relation to canny—the work of the Scot-
tish antiquary and philologist John Jamieson, who published the first volume of his
first edition of An Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language in 1808, “the first
completed British dictionary to substantiate its definitions with accurately referenced
quotations, usually in chronological order, and therefore the first dictionary on histori-
cal principles of any variety of English.”21 Heslop was very familiar with the various
iterations of this important work, since in NW he makes thirty-five references to it.
In spite of this, he does not mention Jamieson’s definition of canny, which provides
no less than eighteen separate senses, supported with a rich array of citations. These
are “Cautious, prudent”; “Artful, crafty”; “Attentive, wary, watchful”; “Frugal, not
given to expence”; “Moderate in charges, reasonable in demands”; “Useful, beneficial”;
“Handy, expert at any business”; “Gentle, so as not to hurt a sore”; “Soft, easy; as
applied to a state of rest”; “Slow in motion”; “Soft and easy in motion”; “Safe, not
dangerous; not difficult to manage”; “Composed, deliberate”; “Not hard, not difficult
of execution”; “Easy in situation, snug; comfortable”; “Fortunate, lucky”; “Fortunate,
used in a superstitious sense”; “Good, worthy”.22 We might tentatively conclude that
Heslop was aware of Jamieson’s scholarship on canny, but chose to ignore it, since the

18
Taken together, Francis Grose’s A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785) and A Provincial Glossary,
were, in their day regarded as “the largest assemblage of ‘non-standard’ words or meanings … omitted from
Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary” and were widely known amongst philologists and etymologists (see Farrant).
19
Grose, A Provincial Dictionary, no pagination.
20
Brockett, 37.
21
Aitken, 902.
22
Jamieson, no pagination. There are two additional senses of canny in the 1818 edition: “Endowed with knowl-
edge, supposed by the vulgar to proceed from a preternatural origin”; “Applied to any instrument, it signifies well-
fitted, convenient.”
 568 M. Pearce
picture it presented of a word used throughout Scotland with a wide range of meanings
undermines his argument for what he regarded as the distinctive and unique qualities
of “our own” (i.e. the North East English) canny. The Dictionary of the Scots Language
(DSL)23 confirms that meanings associated with approval and approbation, which
Heslop confines to Northumberland and Tyneside canny, have been in wide use
north of the border. DSL includes the following definitions for canny as an adjective
(the date of the earliest supporting citation is given in brackets): “Free from risk,
safe” (1592); “Lucky; pleasant” (1688); “Favourable; fortunate, lucky, of good
omen” (1715); “Pleasant; good, kind” (1733); “Gentle, quiet, steady” (1762);
“Skilful, dexterous” (1768); “Comfortable, easy” (1816); “Safe, without dire or unplea-
sant consequences” (1834).
But perhaps the oddest lexicographical sleight of hand perpetrated by Heslop is the
most straightforward to uncover. In his essay, he suggests that Ogilvie’s definition of
canny as “cautious; prudent; artful; crafty; wary; frugal” does not capture the
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meaning of the word as it is used in the North East. But Heslop should have read
on. The definition continues thus: “expert at any business; gentle; easy in circumstances;
snug, comfortable; fortunate, safe.”24 These “positive” senses are closely aligned to
Heslop’s understanding of what canny signifies in North East England, but their pres-
ence in Ogilvie is inconvenient for his argument, so he conveniently ignores them.

The Cultural Saliency of Canny in the Nineteenth Century

So, it seems that when Heslop was writing in the late nineteenth century there was con-
siderable evidence to hand which should have alerted him to the fact that what he was
presenting as a North East meaning of canny was actually a phenomenon with a wider
geographical spread. However, although “positive” meanings of canny are more dis-
persed than Heslop allows (and, indeed, to a lesser extent meanings associated with
what Heslop regards as the “characteristically Scotch”25 qualities of frugality, prudence
and cunning are also evident in North East England) there is an underlying truth to his
claims, associated with what might be termed “cultural saliency”. In the North East, it
seems that the culturally most salient—and almost certainly most frequently used—
meanings of canny are those which Heslop privileges. And there is plenty of evidence
to support this claim. Using the online interface, I identified all citations in the EDD
containing the word canny associated with the North East counties of Durham or
Northumberland. Assuming that Wright—unlike Heslop—had no particular axe to
grind with regards to this word, the citations should give some idea of the most
common usages recorded for these counties. And the semantic picture captured is
indeed largely “positive”. Familial bonds of affection and romantic love are conveyed

23
The Dictionary of the Scots Language combines the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (compiled between
1931 and 2002) and the Scottish National Dictionary (1931–76) into a single online resource.
24
Ogilvie, ed., 276.
25
Heslop, “Canny,” 183.
 History, Cultural Significance and Current Use of Canny 569

with canny: “maw canny bairns”; “ma canny hinny”; “maw canny lass”; “me awn
canny mother”; “my canny keel laddie”. Solidarity is expressed through terms of
address containing canny: “‘What weage dus te ax, canny lad?’ says yen”; “Hoy a
hap’ney, canny man”; “Hi, canny man, ye’ve bashed yor hat”. Valued and admired
buildings or places are described as canny: “my awn canny calf-yaird”; “canny old
chapel”; “wor canny hooses”; “wor canny town”; “canny Newcastle”; “canny Shields”.
It is interesting to consider at this point the sources of these quotations. Many of
them are derived from what might broadly be termed “dialect literature”.26 According
to Patrick Joyce, “from around the 1840s there developed in Lancashire, Yorkshire and
the north-east of England a dialect literature of wide appeal to the working people of
these districts”27 and which, in Dave Russell’s words, “undoubtedly played an impor-
tant role in the construction and reflection of northern mentalities for the century
from about 1830.”28 Robert Colls goes back a little further, noting that “as a flourishing
commercial activity in Newcastle, dialect literature can be traced from at least the
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beginning of the 19th century.” In this literature, which mainly took the form of
ballads and songs, “a strong strain of caricature prevailed. Heroes were often colliers
or sailors, and sometimes quayside beauties, all projecting a place of substance and
spirit.”29 Some of the most well-known of these works include “Bonny Keel
Laddie”, “The Collier’s Rant” and “Blaydon Races” (this song, which is often referred
to as the “Geordie anthem”, is still sung at every Newcastle United F.C. home game).
Katie Wales argues that, despite editorial practices which might have served to “tidy
up” the dialect element of these works, the printed versions do nevertheless preserve
“those features which were linguistically salient” in the geographical areas in which
they circulated. She points out that in the North East, the texts capture phonological
features such as “the characteristic fronted and diphthongized /ɪə/ as in myek
(‘make’), hyem (‘home’), byeth (‘both’); /u:/ for /ɑʊ/ as in oot (‘out’), roond
(‘round’); /i:/ as in neet, reet (‘night’, right’); the fronted tyeuk, seun, stuil (‘took’,
‘soon’, ‘stool’); and the striking linking prosody /v/ as in iv (‘in’), intiv (‘into’).” Gram-
matical and lexical variation is also much in evidence:

26
This is a genre with a complex status in England, amongst linguists, literary scholars and authors. The term
dialect literature is usually used to refer to work which is written in a non-standard variety, largely for the local
consumption of people who are familiar with the dialect (in contrast to literary dialect, where representations
of dialect speech occur within a mainly Standard English matrix). See Shorrocks, 386. George Eliot, in a letter
to Walter Skeat (reproduced in the introduction to an 1877 English Dialect Society publication) elegantly sums
up the difficulties involved in representing the vernacular speech of the English Midlands in her fiction: “my incli-
nation to be as close as I could to the rendering of dialect, both in words and spelling, was constantly checked by
the artistic duty of being generally intelligible” (Skeat and Nodal, eds., viii). Eliot was writing literary dialect;
authors of dialect literature, on the other hand, only have to trouble themselves with local intelligibility (and
authenticity).
27
Joyce, 256.
28
Russell, 120.
29
Colls, 163.
 570 M. Pearce
wor (“our”) is notable, divvent (“don’t”) and thorsels (“themselves”), and the familiar
pronoun of address (thou/tha/t). Lexically, lad/laddie, hinnie (“honey”), man and
marrow/marra (“mate”) are common terms of address in songs which are typically
dialogues or monologues; and recurring epithets are bonny and canny (“nice”). By
the common collocations wor canny lads or me and my marrows are conveyed a
strong sense of occupational and community solidarity.30

The richness of these representations makes local songs a valuable source of infor-
mation about dialect. Wright and the members of the English Dialect Society certainly
acknowledged this in their lexicographical work.31
The fact that canny appears so regularly in vernacular literature suggests that its use
among the people was widespread. The reasoning behind this claim is simply that in
literary genres where authenticity is a key value, words of vernacular speech with high
general frequency are bound to occur. But this is just an assumption (albeit a reason-
able one). How can we know that this word was widely used in the everyday speech of
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north easterners? After all, most of the nineteenth-century evidence considered so far
comes from literary texts. Of course, there are no recordings to listen to, but by using
a well-established method in historical sociolinguistics we can at least approximate
“the characteristics of spoken language in earlier historical periods.”32 This is done,
according to Douglas Biber and Edward Finegan, by looking at particular forms of
written language which have their origins in speech. “Such speech-based registers
include transcriptions of actual speech, as in town meetings or court testimony, as
well as fictional representations of speech, as in drama or fictional dialogue.”33 A par-
ticularly rich source of “actual speech” in the form of testimony in this period is the
newspaper, and it is through the reporting of news and, in particular, court cases
(assizes) that we can hear something of the authentic voices of people before the
advent of recorded sound. Embedded in often harrowing (and sometimes
amusing) reports of criminal trials, the speech of witnesses and defendants is pre-
served by court reporters. In this way the final words of a man apparently murdered
by a police constable in 1832 have come down to us: “He laid his hand upon his
shoulder and said, “My canny man, gan away, and let’s have peace and quietness.”
The police replied, “Stand back you b––r,” and instantly shot him.” Or the tale of
Robert Holmes, a fruit dealer, robbed at knifepoint in 1836 after he had bet “a
very canny dancer” that he could “do the double shuffle” better than he. Or, more
poignantly the plea of a woman found guilty of infanticide as she was being taken
to Durham gaol in 1846: “Oh, sir, I hope they will be canny with me, for it was
the first thing I had ever done.” The word canny, with all its subtle shades of

30
Wales, 132.
31
Ibid., 128. Indeed, Wright’s insistence on written authority to corroborate each meaning of a form in the EDD
(Penhallurick, 304), meant that dialect literature had to be taken very seriously by English Dialect Society
members.
32
Biber and Finnegan, 66.
33
Ibid., 66.
 History, Cultural Significance and Current Use of Canny 571

meaning, appears regularly in North East newspapers throughout the nineteenth

century, captured in the reported speech of ordinary working folk: “canny-sized
room” (1831); “canny man” (1846); “canny fellow” (1852); “canny young Cheil”
(1855); “canny mother” (1857); “canny pension” (1859); “canny bairns” (1861);
“canny fellows” (1862); “canny bairn” (1865); “be canny with us” (1866); “canny
scholar” (1867); “a canny few” (1871); “I told her to be canny with the child”
(1873); “a canny little wife” (1874); “Be canny, now” (1876); “ma canny woman”
(1876); “My Canny John” (1876).34 There is ample evidence here to suggest that
the song writers, in their literary use of canny, were drawing on the living vernacular
speech of local people.35
Dialect literature and the newspapers also furnish us with evidence for canny as a
“cultural keyword” during this period. The term “keyword” (or “key word”) is particu-
larly associated with the pioneering work of Raymond Williams, who published
Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society in 1976.36 In cultural studies, a
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keyword is a lexical item which is “important and revealing in a given culture”.37

Such cultural keywords are identified through a deductive procedure; in Anna Wierz-
bicka’s words

to show that a particular word is of special importance … one has to make a case for
it. … To begin with, one may want to establish … that the word in question is a
common word, not a marginal word. One may also want to establish that the
word … is very frequently used in one particular semantic domain, for example,
in the domain of emotions, or … moral judgments. Furthermore, one may want
to show that this word is at the center of a whole phraseological cluster. … One
may also be able to show that the proposed “key word” occurs frequently in pro-
verbs, in sayings, in popular songs, in book titles, and so on.38

How far, according to Wierzbicka’s stipulations, does the evidence suggest that
canny is “key” in North East England in the nineteenth century? We have seen that
canny is “a common word” with its regular appearance in newspapers and dialect lit-
erature and it is often associated with a particular semantic domain, which we might
gloss as “the domain of positive evaluation and morality”. Canny also has a distinctive
phraseological behaviour. As an attributive adjective it often modifies human nouns:
canny bairns, canny lass, canny mother. It also combines with quantifying nouns:
canny bit, canny few. Furthermore it can often be found in songs, sayings and proverbs:
canny keel laddie, canny Newcastle, canny Toon. Such epithets suggest a self-confident

34
These examples of canny from the 1830s to the 1870s are from the Newcastle Courant (published in Newcastle
between 1711 and 1876) and the Northern Echo (published from 1870 to the present in Darlington). They are
searchable on the 19th-Century British Library Newspapers site.
35
For a discussion of the domestic, communal, locally patriotic and ironic functions of canny in nineteenth-
century Tyneside dialect songs, see Hermeston, 199–210 and 235–43.
36
Williams.
37
Wierzbicka, 15–16.
38
Ibid., 16.
 572 M. Pearce
and assertive sense of localness. The phrase “canny Newcastle” occurs sixty times in
North East newspapers in the period 1800–1900, with the earliest appearance in
1838. But it is not confined to publications within the region. Evidence of its currency
can be seen in twenty-nine appearances in the London papers and twenty-eight in
papers published in Yorkshire and Humberside.39 The North East papers also have
twelve incidences of “canny Newcassel” and twenty-two of “canny toon”.40
A further test of a word’s cultural keyness—one not explicitly mentioned by Wierz-
bicka, but which is implicit in the whole project of identifying and explicating a
keyword—is the extent to which it becomes the subject of metalinguistic commentary,
of the sort exemplified by the various interventions on behalf of canny mentioned in
this article. But Heslop, the Scot writing in Chambers’s Journal and Mr W. Finley speak-
ing to the teachers in Gateshead could not have been, of course, the only ones attempt-
ing to pick apart canny’s strands of meaning. They were contributing to a widespread
metalinguistic discourse. The extent to which the meanings of canny must have exer-
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cised many people in the North East is demonstrated by a letter from a Reverend Price
to the editor of the Northern Echo in 1895, in which the word is evoked to illuminate a
complex theological point in the exegesis of a Latin text:

There is nothing like an illustration to bring home a fact. In the county of Durham
the word “canny” means “good,” “excellent,” “nice,” and “a canny company,” “a
canny church,” “a canny man,” are very frequently heard phrases. In Scotland the
word “canny” means “cautious.” It would be just as wrong to say that the word
“canny” used by a Durham miner meant “cautious,” and not “good,” as to say
that “convenire ad” meant “to conform to” and not “resort to.”41

The fact that the Reverend chooses variation in the meaning and use of canny to illus-
trate his argument is significant, indicating that when he wrote this, canny was well
established as a cultural keyword in North East England.

Canny in Modern North East English

By the end of the nineteenth century, canny had acquired what might be called verna-
cular keyword status, and it has maintained this throughout the twentieth and into the
twenty-first century, appearing in popular publications celebrating the region’s linguis-
tic and cultural distinctiveness and remaining the subject of discussion and meta-com-
mentary in a variety of contexts. It is remarked upon in travel guides and gazetteers
(“one of those ubiquitous words that almost defies definition although it is generally

39
The wide currency of such expressions is illustrated by Elizabeth Gaskell who, in a letter to a friend in 1849
wrote: “I picked up quantities of charming expressive words in canny Newcastle” (in Myers, 33).
40
Note here the respelling of Newcastle, perhaps to indicate that—in terms of stress—the preferred local pronun-
ciation is different from the one used by non-locals (in the North East, the stress often falls on the second syllable,
elsewhere it only falls on the first). And toon (S.E. town) indicates the pre-Great Vowel Shift MOUTH vowel ([u:]),
a traditional Tyneside pronunciation (Beal, “Popular Literature,” 348).
41
Price, 4.
 History, Cultural Significance and Current Use of Canny 573
42
used in a tone of approval” ) and is discussed in newspapers, as in this letter from a
correspondent in Cleveland which appeared in the Independent on Sunday in 2002:

It can be used to mean “careful”, as in “gan canny”, ie “farewell” or proceed with

care. Then again it can mean “cute, pretty” when used of a child (“a canny
bairn”) or even a place. It can mean having a pleasant, engaging personality. …
The ultimate accolade in Teesside is to be described as “dead canny”. No way
would we ever describe any devious, artful or cunning person as “canny”. For us,
that personality trait would be the exact opposite of “canny”.43

You can buy mugs emblazoned with the phrase “Aye aye canny man” and “Geordie
dialect translator” tea towels (“Varry canny—alright”). Canny is also routinely used
in popular national newspapers in association with “North East” people and subjects,
as these recent headlines demonstrate: “CHERYL’S CANNY IN CANNES”; “TOON
HAVE TO BE CANNY SPENDERS”; “A CANNY SIGNING FOR BRUCE”;
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“HOWAY! WHAT A CANNY DISH”; “WE’RE TOO CANNY TO BE ANT AND

DEBT”.44 There is even a website devoted to vaginal health called “Canny Fanny”.
The appearance of canny in such “performative” contexts as kitchenware and
tabloid headlines indicates that the word is implicated in a process of “enregisterment”,
whereby particular linguistic forms, as a consequence of being “outlined in dialect dic-
tionaries and used by writers and entertainers” help to reify the idea of a dialect, pro-
viding “models for the performance of local identity.”45
Its status may be unassailable, but in certain respects “our canny” (in North East
England in 2013) is not quite the same canny as Heslop’s. While canny as an adjective
has remained, since the 1960s, relatively stable in its meanings (though not, perhaps, in
its syntactic role), canny as an adverb appears to have undergone some expansion of
function. In order to illustrate these points, I draw on sociolinguistic interviews
from the Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (DECTE), which com-
bines and digitizes “the Tyneside Linguistic Survey (TLS) of the 1960s and the Phono-
logical Variation and Change in Contemporary Spoken English (PVC) corpus of
1994”;46 and two novels in which representations of North East vernacular speech
are used extensively: Sid Chaplin’s The Watchers and the Watched (1962) and Jonathan
Tulloch’s The Bonny Lad (2001).47 I also refer to a small, specialized corpus of online
discourse which I assembled in 2010. Evidence from these sources adds to our

42
White, 200.
43
Wood, 27.
44
“Cheryl” is Cheryl Cole, a well-known singer and television personality from Newcastle. (The) “Toon” are New-
castle United Football Club. (Steve) Bruce was the manager of Newcastle United F.C.’s arch-rivals, Sunderland A.
F.C. “Ant and Debt” is a pun on “Ant and Dec,” two insufferably cheerful television presenters from Newcastle.
45
Beal, “Enregisterment,” 140.
46
See the project website: Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English.
47
Sid Chaplin’s novel was written at the “high watermark” of English social realism (Russell, 81). As John Lucas
(547) points out: the “close, intimate inspection of working-class lives” which social realist writers attempted,
required accurate representations of speech, so we can assume that the features Chaplin incorporates into his dia-
logue—such as use of regionally marked lexis—were current in the speech of North East England when he was
 574 M. Pearce
understanding of the semantic and syntactic behaviour of canny as both an adjective
and an adverb, and brings the story of this cultural keyword up to date.
What semantic and syntactic profile does canny have as an adjective in North East
English? Semantically, canny is an evaluative adjective. Such adjectives (e.g. good,
nice, bad) are used widely in the expression of a speaker or writer’s feelings and atti-
tudes.48 There is a tendency for canny to be used in conjunction with nouns with
human referents, although there is perhaps a slight widening in the collocational be-
haviour of canny over time, with 48 per cent of adjectival canny collocating with
human referents in Chaplin and TLS, and just over 40 per cent in PVC and
Tulloch. Canny is a “central” adjective. According to Randolph Quirk et al., an adjec-
tive is “central” if it can freely occur attributively (e.g. “maw canny bairns”) and pre-
dicatively (e.g. “I hope they will be canny with me”); if it can be premodified by the
intensifier very (e.g. “a very canny dancer”); and if it can take comparative and super-
lative forms (e.g. “the canniest lad that ever put a tub”).49 While canny passes these
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tests, in common with all adjectives, it has certain syntactic preferences. The nine-
teenth-century evidence suggests that syntactically, canny “prefers” to function attribu-
tively (at least, most of the lexicographical examples would suggest this). But in the
corpus containing material from the 1960s to 1990s, we see a possible shift from attri-
butive to predicative uses of canny. In the earlier TLS interviews, there are no instances
of canny functioning predicatively (that is, as the head of an adjective phrase following
a copular verb), whereas in the later PVC interviews, nearly 70 per cent of occurrences
of adjectival canny are predicative. The difference is not as stark in the novels, but
nevertheless canny as a predicative adjective occurs three times more often in
Tulloch (2001) than it does in Chaplin (1962). This difference could be a symptom
of a general preference for predicative evaluative adjectives in the later sub-corpus.
For example, the high frequency adjective good functions predicatively just 36 per
cent of the time in TLS, but 60 per cent of the time in PVC.50 The question of
whether the behaviour of evaluative adjectives such as canny and good simply reflects
differences in the way the interviews were carried out in TLS and PVC, or whether it
reflects a general change over time in syntactic preferences for predication or attribu-
tion in spoken English, lies beyond the scope of this article.51
And what about possible change over time in relation to canny as an adverb? Neither
Grose (1787) nor Brockett (1825) record canny functioning adverbially, and Jamieson
only mentions it in passing in the 1808 edition of his Scottish etymological dictionary
(“‘To gang canny’ … to move slowly”). However, in the 1887 supplement (published

writing the novel. Forty years later, Jonathan Tulloch’s work is part of this same tradition and is equally concerned
with fidelity to the speech of “real” north easterners.
48
Biber et al., 980.
49
Quirk et al., 402–3. The example of canniest is from Chaplin’s The Bachelor Uncle & Other Stories, 73.
50
Based on a random sample of fifty occurrences of good in each sub-corpora.
51
In their variationist work on DECTE, Kate Barnfield and Isabelle Buchstaller point out that the interview tech-
niques in the earlier TLS component were “ethnographically inspired and one-on-one” compared with the poten-
tially more informal “conversational dyads” employed in the PVC component (261).
 History, Cultural Significance and Current Use of Canny 575

some fifty years after Jamieson’s death) David Donaldson notes that “the adverbial use
of this word is very common in the West of Scotland, and its applications are exceed-
ingly varied.”52 As we have seen, Wright identifies adverbial uses of canny in the EDD.
Indeed, he has tracked down what is probably the earliest evidence for canny as an
adverb to appear in a dictionary (see Box 1, sense 8). And Heslop also records
canny as an adverb. The evidence suggests that adverbial use of canny “took off” (in
both Scotland and North East England) during the nineteenth century (evidence
from nineteenth-century newspapers also supports this). What about canny as an
adverb in the twentieth century? The most interesting development here is in relation
to canny as a degree adverb. According to Biber et al., degree adverbs—which can be
amplifiers or downtoners—describe “the extent to which a characteristic holds.”
Amplifiers increase the intensity of the gradable adjective they precede, indicating
degrees on a scale. Conversely, downtoners “scale down the effect of the modified
item.” Adverbs commonly used as amplifiers include very, extremely, completely;
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adverbs often used as downtoners include fairly, quite, pretty.53 In addition, Quirk
et al. identify certain adverbs which can function as emphasizers, adding “to the
force (as distinct from the degree) of the adjective.” Common emphasizers include
actually, definitely, really.54 There are no instances of canny functioning in these
ways in the earlier part of the corpus, but in PVC and Tulloch we have the following:

(1) So that should be canny good. (PVC)

(2) He managed to get posted there for the last three years which was canny good
because all he was doing was building houses. (PVC)
(3) I only see my mam once a week which is dead hard because we used to be canny
close. (PVC)
(4) “Ye’re a canny clever lad, ye,” said the old man, with a bitter irony. (The Bonny
Lad)
(5) “She keeps a canny good house, your lass.” (The Bonny Lad)
(6) “It’s canny good this.” (The Bonny Lad)
(7) “It’s a canny chunky bugger.” (The Bonny Lad)
(8) “Canny good spot,” he called. (The Bonny Lad)
(9) “Them legs is canny long.” (The Bonny Lad)
(10) “Aye, canny daft,” replied Joe. (The Bonny Lad)

Although such usages do not occur in Chaplin or TLS, this does not necessarily mean
that canny as a degree adverb is unknown before the 1990s. Kate Barnfield and Isabelle
Buchstaller, in their detailed and extensive variationist study of intensifiers on Tyneside

52
Donaldson, 67. He also points out that “some of the illustrations” of canny as an adjective in Jamieson are “really
adverbial.”
53
Biber et al., 554–5. There is considerable terminological flexibility in relation to these linguistic features, which
are also known as “intensifiers” and “intensifying adverbs” (see Murphy, 111).
54
Quirk et al., 447, 583.
 576 M. Pearce
(based on DECTE materials), suggest that “intensifier canny may constitute the only
true innovation in our data, and perhaps even one particular to Tyneside.”
However, there is some (albeit very sparse) evidence to suggest that, contrary to
what Barnfield and Buchstaller claim, canny as an intensifier is not “entirely innova-
tive”:55 there is in fact a greater time depth and a wider geographical range. For
example, in 1953, the Survey of English Dialects (SED) recorded a seventy-three-
year-old former champion piper from Wark in Northumberland using canny as an
intensifier, and I have also managed to track down this example from a County
Durham mining glossary from the 1970s: “Canny good … Not too bad.”56 But the ear-
liest example I have so far found is in the EDD, which gives this (undated) instance
from Westmoreland: “We are canny near home” (Box 1, sense 9). The meaning
here is glossed as “fairly, tolerably”, which suggests that it has been interpreted as a
downtoner (home is fairly near). However, this example illustrates the problems
associated with the interpretation of canny as a degree adverb, since the speaker
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could be indicating extreme closeness to home (they might be “very” near home),
which would make canny an amplifier in this case.
Similarly, the examples from PVC and Tulloch also illustrate the difficulties of
interpreting canny. It is certainly not used unambiguously as an amplifier. In other
words, an adverb such as very could not necessarily replace canny in all these
examples: something or someone deemed canny good, for example, might be “very
good” or “quite good”. Indeed, speakers use adverbs like canny to hedge their bets,
as it were, and leave space for adjustment within the ongoing discourse. What a
speaker intends and a hearer/reader infers is dependent on contextual factors. For
example, the surrounding co-text might indicate whether the quality of the adjective
is being reinforced or attenuated in some way; also, speaker intonation might be
important.57
During the course of this article we have seen the range of positive meanings associ-
ated with canny, and it is worth noting that in these examples canny is also used “posi-
tively”. That is, what is intensified generally has a positive semantic value. This is
obviously the case with adjectives like good and close (in the personal relational
sense of the word) but even when canny modifies adjectives without a clearly positive
meaning, as in examples (7), (9) and (10), the wider context of use is positive. So that
when characters in The Bonny Lad say “canny chunky” and “canny long” they are
describing, in approving terms, the considerable girth of an escaped python and the
length of a pet spider’s legs; and when someone is referred to as “canny daft” it is
within a sequence of banter between friends, in which “daft” is a term of endearment
rather than a criticism.58 In the words of John Morley and Alan Partington, “even
when premodifying an apparently unfavourable item”, certain degree adverbs “often

55
Barnfield and Buchstaller, 272, 281.
56
Orton and Halliday, 907; Douglass, 310–11.
57
Paradis, 142–5.
58
Tulloch, 154, 211, 231.
 History, Cultural Significance and Current Use of Canny 577

carry the instruction-suggestion to look around the context for something being
approved”, and that is what is happening in these cases.59
But there is a further stage in the development of canny as a degree adverb, which
involves a leeching of its positive associations. To bring the story up to date I turn to
my corpus of online discourse. To build the corpus I used Google’s advanced search
capabilities to look for publicly available pages from social network sites main-
tained by users from North East England which contained the words canny and
geet/git (another North East vernacular feature which has been described else-
where).60 In the context of social networking, where participants discuss and
make arrangements about their social lives, forge and maintain relationships and
convey aspects of their personality and beliefs, language in which affect, stance
or involvement is shown on behalf of the speaker/writer is common, making inten-
sification—which has an obvious affective or attitudinal dimension—a valued lin-
guistic resource.
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In my corpus, just over 61 per cent of all instances of canny are functioning as degree
adverbs. The adjectives modified by canny are: amusing, bladdered, bored, chuffed, con-
fusing, cool, cush (2), embarrassing, freezing, fun, funny, gd, good (6), gooood, gutted,
happy, long, mint (3), sad, shit (6), shite, short (2), skint, strong, sweet.61 Over half of
these are used in “positive” contexts (e.g. “canny cool”). But approximately 40 per
cent occur in unambiguously negative contexts (e.g. “just everywhere was canny
shit”), a phenomenon which has not been observed before in this article. The fact
that in contemporary North East English something (or someone) can be canny
shit,62 as well as canny cool suggests that the word is undergoing a process of delexica-
lization: over time its “lexical content” has been reduced “so that it comes to fulfil a
particular grammatical function … but has little or no independent meaning.”63 In
other words, in some cases canny is simply performing the functions of intensification
or emphasis when it precedes an adjective. Of course, this process is common through-
out the history of English. When used as amplifiers, downtoners and emphasizers,
words such as bloody, fucking, pretty, fairly and terribly bear little, if any, trace of
their full semantic value. The introduction of canny into the system of intensification
in North East English reflects how innovative speakers tend to be in this area of
language. As Sali A. Tagliamonte states, much research on intensifiers stresses the
idea that “renewal is critical”. Bolinger (1972) speaks of the “fevered invention” associ-
ated with intensifiers, a creativity “driven by speakers’ desires to be original,

59
Morley and Partington, 155.
60
See Pearce, “Geet.” The sites used were MySpace and Bebo.
61
Bladdered = “drunk”; chuffed = “pleased”; cush is an abbreviation of cushty meaning “easy, comfortable”; gutted
= “upset, disappointed”; mint = “excellent”; skint = “having no money.” Shit and shite are functioning as adjectives
here.
62
Typically, shit(e) as an adjective is ungradable (in the same way as mint at the other end of the semantic con-
tinuum), so that canny here is not an intensifier but an emphasizer (like really), adding to the force (rather
than the degree) of the adjective. See Quirk et al., 447.
63
Morley and Partington, 155. See also Partington.
 578 M. Pearce
demonstrate verbal skills and to capture attention.”64 It is perhaps no coincidence that
my 2010 corpus contains the highest proportion of “new” uses of canny as an intensi-
fier. Adolescence is often “the focal point for linguistic innovation and change”,65 and
because, by and large, users of social network sites are young, these websites are often a
crucible of language change. The notion of “fevered invention” fits nicely with the
context of social networking, where linguistic originality and skill is often used to
attract attention, as these examples from the 2010 corpus demonstrate:

(11) Recently I have started to play the clarinet which is geet canny.
(12) Haha its canny long like.
(13) same to you guys like canny mint
(14) Haha ayee, hes canny shit as a headteacher.
(15) Hallow like canny lad—been geet ages like!
(16) gan canny and tak it eeezeeee
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(17) good nite the otha neet?? was canny wasnt it??
(18) yous are canny shite like
(19) aye canny cush ta.
(20) haha aye its canny funny like

Here we see canny in its full range of syntactic roles—as attributive and predicative
adjective, as a general adverb and degree adverb—in the context of dramatic displays
of vernacular identity involving non-standard lexis (geet, mint, gan, tak, aye and cush),
morphology (yous) and discourse features (sentence-final like); together with semi-
phonetic respellings intended to represent features of North East accent (<Hallow>,
<otha>, <neet>).

Conclusion
The starting point for my discussion of canny was Heslop’s rhapsodic encomium in
North-Country Lore and Legend. His emotionally charged account is in keeping
with the intent of much of his dialectological work on North East English, which
emphasizes the distinctiveness and indeed “purity” of modes of speech viewed
“almost without exception” as “singularly barbarous” by outsiders, but which are
held in “passionate regard” by the inhabitants of a region where “the ‘Inglis of the
Northin lede’ has been least affected, in its vocalization, by outside influences.”66
We have seen how Heslop’s version of canny, though somewhat partial, reflects the

64
Bolinger, 18; Tagliamonte, 391. A measure of this fevered inventiveness is the Survey of English Dialects (the
fieldwork for which was carried out between 1950 and 1961). Forty-six items are recorded as functioning as an
intensifying adverb (more or less the equivalent of very). For the North East, canny is listed alongside gay, terrible,
bonny and fair. See Orton and Halliday, 907; and Upton, Parry and Widdowson, 450.
65
Chambers, 176.
66
Heslop, NW, 1:xii.
 History, Cultural Significance and Current Use of Canny 579

special status of the word in the region in the nineteenth century, and how its cultural
keyness was maintained throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century,
where it acquired a new function as part of the system of vernacular intensification.
Heslop, I am sure, would have been fascinated by the uses to which canny has been
put by north easterners down to the present day, and heartened by its longevity. There
is something immensely intriguing about a word which, on the one hand, can be used
to convey deep and sincere praise in a funeral eulogy (he was a “good lad, a canny lad,
a likeable lad”67), and on the other can function as a delexicalized intensifier to
express absolute scorn and hatred (“Durham is canny shit”).

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