“By heck, it’s getting like t’back end now.”

A neighbour made this comment on a chilly afternoon last week, just hours after my sister sent me a photograph on Facebook, of the words ‘back-end’ as they appear in a dictionary (‘the time following harvest’). This definition is followed by the word ‘Backendish’, which means ‘winterly’.

In the area where we grew up, the words ‘back-end’ were part of common parlance. Older people, in particular, would lean on their gate in early autumn, look up towards the sky, rub their upper arms with their hands and make a comment that usually contained the expression.

One elderly lady called Elsie would amble up the path beside our house, spot my mum hanging out washing and begin a half-hour conversation about the weather that, at this time of year, focused upon the ‘back-end.’ Not once did we teenagers snigger when we heard it, as my fellow students did when, having moved to the south-east, I mentioned it. Not surprisingly, they thought I was referring to someone’s bottom.

I was reminded of this when my daughter announced that no-one at her southern university, had heard of the term ‘pack-up’ for a packed lunch.

I could understand the southerners finding it puzzling, but some of the northerners too, had not come across it.

When I lived in the south, I regularly found people asking me what certain words meant. “What’s nithered?” I remember my housemates asking, as I complained about the cold one night (late back-end, I imagine).

No-one knew what a croggy (a ride as a passenger on a bike meant for one) was, or a gadgie (a man), and I had to explain to everyone how I felt when I was radged (annoyed). As kids we used to go around saying he or she was radged all the time, so I was a bit disturbed when I typed it into Google to find it translated as: ‘to be excessively aroused (sexually)’. Good job no-one in school had internet access then.

Sadly, with increased mobility within populations, these expressions and other local slang terms are in danger of dying out. It is such a shame. We should all do our best to pass those quirky words we learned as children to future generations. I’ve made sure my daughters know what the back-end is, even if they are too embarrassed to use it. in polite company.

Google offers up five definitions of ‘back-end’ and I am sad to see that not one relates to the season.

A mixture of nouns and adjectives, they include ‘the end of something that is furthest from the front’, ‘the rump or buttocks’, and ‘relating to the end of a project or investment.’ Depressingly, the term even has an application in modern technology - it denotes ‘a subordinate processor or program, not directly accessed by the user, which performs a specialised function on behalf of a main processor or software system - such as ‘a back-end database server.’ I wonder what Elsie would make of that.