Who is popular today?

The American actor Beanie Feldstein has been working in a shop in Wolverhampton to prepare for her role in the film of Caitlin Moran’s How to Build a Girl. Here’s how to understand the lingo
My finely tuned West Midlands ears pricked up this week at word of the California actress Beanie Feldstein working in a shop in Wolverhampton in order to learn the Black Country dialect. It was research for her role in the film adaptation of Caitlin Moran’s How to Build a Girl. While I simply can’t believe there is no British actor suitable for the role of Caitlin Moran, it’s great that Feldstein is a) making the effort to do the thing properly and b) going to get the difference between the Black Country and Birmingham accents, which is not really understood anywhere more than 30 miles from, say, Cradley Heath.
I’m delighted we are going to hear words such as “bostin’” on the big screen (if it doesn’t appear in the film of Moran’s book, I’ll be livid, as I expect Moran would be). Bostin means great, derived, I have always assumed, from bursting, as in something so great it’s bursting out of itself. The associated noun is “boster”, as in “what a boster that goal was!” Many moons ago, I taught English to Spanish kids in Rickmansworth, of all places. I well remember them shooting down a water slide yelling “What a boster!” at me. Continue reading...