It would interest the author of the epigraph to know that ploating is indeed a dialect word with considerable pedigree in North East England (though it is a newcomer compared with some). According to OED, the verb ploat – which it describes as English regional (chiefly northern) – has two sources: one is Dutch ploten ‘to pluck’; the other is from Scots plot meaning ‘to scorch or burn; to make too hot, to overheat’ (unlike ploat, the origin of plot in this sense is unknown). The earliest OED citation for ploat is 1757, and it first appears in a dictionary in 1825 (Brockett’s Glossary of North Country Words), while plot’s earliest citation is from 1606. The EDD entry for plot (to which readers are directed from ploat) includes variants like ploat, plooat, plooit, plote, plout, and plowt, and gives a distribution across Scotland and northern England (Northumberland, County Durham, Westmorland, Cumberland, and Yorkshire). It lists several senses concerning high temperature (particularly in relation to liquids, but also general heat, burning, and scorching) as well as ones relating to the plucking of feathers (figuratively extended to ‘fleece, rob, plunder … cheat’) – thus reflecting the word’s ‘double’ etymology. The final sense given is another figurative extension: ‘to scold’. Ploat also features in SED. It is elicited by the question ‘What do you say you do when you strip the feathers off a dead chicken?’ and is recorded for all six northern counties except Lancashire, with an interviewee from County Durham describing ploat as ‘older’ than the ‘more genteel’ pluck (Orton and Halliday 1963: 408). By the time of the Voices survey, it is only recorded for North East England, elicited by the prompt TO HIT HARD, with participants in Longbenton suggesting it was ‘used in past’ and offering I’ll ploat you if you’re naughty as an example (Robinson 2021: 303).

Ploat, with its long, well-attested history is clearly a central member of a subset of the English lexicon which I refer to as ‘Traditional Dialect Lexis’, or TDL (Pearce 2020). This chapter focuses mainly on words found on RTG belonging to this group. More precisely, if a word (or non-standard usage of an otherwise standard form) was recorded in EDD or SED for any Northumbrian location (that is, any location in the historical counties of Northumberland or County Durham) it is regarded as a traditional North East dialect word. I do not claim to have located all items falling within these parameters on RTG. The words recorded here should therefore be treated as a sample of a larger set of unknown size.