Similar Brit English words that I sometimes read but never hear in person/Midwest US English are duffer and punter.
Perhaps ‘proprietor.’ For franchises like a Subway restaurant or fuel station, you might refer to the owner/operator.
I’m very much a white collar worker so I’ve never used the term at work and would say I’ve pretty much exclusively heard it used in a football (soccer) context with players/ex-players/pundits referring to the coach/manager.
Duffer is out of use these days and is most likely to be found in pre-war children’s books as a description of a fool. “Better drowned than duffers, if not duffers won’t drown.” - Arthur Ransome, Swallows and Amazons
Punter is pretty common and is a derogatory term for a customer, especially where the enterprise is borderline or outright illegal. A prostitute’s clients are punters for example, but so are gamblers making a legal wager.
I know the word to mean a gambler but wasn’t aware of it’s wider use. I’m glad we talked.
Come to think of it, duffer does mean something vaguely golfing but so does Dorf. Mostly, I’d take a duffer to be an old man, prideful but clueless.
We use it a lot here (Oz) for people who attend events. Particularly concerts. “They pays their money and they takes their chances.” Even the tortured grammar gives a clue.
Nobody is getting their money back if the music stinks. From there almost any customer is a punter.
Huh, that’s interesting. In Australia, a punter, narrowly speaking, is someone who bets on sporting events, and the like. Broadly speaking, it’s like your average Joe who has a somewhat informed opinion. I can see the connection to the British meaning, but it went in a different direction. I guess average Aussies are assumed to gamble (probably true).
I wouldn’t call ‘punter’ derogatory (I’m British), more like colloquial.
Question. Is the A pronounced as in “bath” or as in “caught”? I don’t think I’ve ever heard the word said aloud, and as an American I’m inclined towards the former, but if it’s derived from “godfather” then I could imagine Brits going with the latter, since the A-as-ou sound is more common in British English, e.g. American “rather” rhyming with “gather” vs. British “rather” rhyming with “father”.
See my earlier link for a full episode.
In context, bath. With a pronounced ɐ
But asking a Brit how bath is pronounced is a charged question. Hint: class and where you live.
bɑːθ versus bɐːθ
Anyone who calls someone their gaffer will be using the same a in both.
Right. Shoud’ve thought of that. The King would not in your wildest dreams deign to eat; raather, he dines.
I gather (rather than “gother”, if you will) that “gaffer” should therefore be pronounced with the working-class A rather than the upper-class A.
I know those symbols are how linguists represent certain ways of pronouncing written words, but you may as well be speaking Welsh for what those things mean to me.
For me, neither. The a in gaffer rhymes with the a in cat.
Is the A in “cat” not the same as the A in “bath” for you? For me it is.
No, as others have alluded to earlier, as a ‘posh’ southerner, for me the vowel in bath rhymes with the one in far.
In some (but not all) British dialects, words that an American would say with an “a” like “cat” may or may not be pronounced differently.
“I can’t do it” = where this “a” is like in “cat” for Americans, “can’t” may become “cahn’t” for many British speakers.
“I can do it” = does not change; “a” is like “cat” for both American and British speakers. Americans who try to affect a British accent and say “cahn” are wrong.
“Bath” and “rather” are affected by this, same as “can’t.” But your reference to “gother,” above, is an incorrect change like “cahn.”
(signed, an American with a background in teaching dialects to actors)
Not to mention the whole cat-caught merger.
Here’s audio links to the pronunciation of “bath” in English dialects. The UK ones are atop. The “a” in “bath” is different than my Great Lakes dialect “a” in “cat.”
I knew about the cot-caught merger, but I didn’t know that cat got swept up in one, too.
The aff in gaffer sounds like the aff in Daffy Duck.
I think ‘regional’ would work better than ‘working class’. As some regions pronounce bath with a long a, whether you’re working class or not. Birmingham, for instance.