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A few weeks ago I was having breakfast with some friends and I was surprised to see what looked to me like a jar of lemon curd labelled as lemon cheese. It turned out that it was indeed lemon curd and that lemon cheese is just another name for it, albeit not one I'd ever heard of. Interestingly, one of my three companions was as unfamiliar with the name as I was, another had heard of it but tended to use the name lemon curd, while the third used lemon cheese as his main term for the stuff and was under the impression that its use was fairly widespread and that lemon curd was the non-standard term.
It just goes to show that while dialect variations within (British) English are nowhere near as pronounced as they are in Welsh, they definitely do exist. Another example that springs to mind is the names for television remote controls. In my family, this device was usually referred to as a zapper, which seemed to be a fairly standard term in South East England. My cousins, growing up in the South West, called the same thing a doofer and found our term as strange as we found theirs.
It's not just individual words that are subject to regional specialisation, but phrases too. For instance, the phrase "cut the cheese" had a certain idiomatic meaning at least amongst my schoolfellows, though I've met very few people from other places who understand why I often grin when somebody mentions cutting the cheese. Rather than give the game away, I'd be interested to know if anyone who didn't grow up on the South Eastern fringes of London in the 1980s and 1990s has come across the phrase in any non-literal meanings and whether it means the same to them as it does to me.
As I mentioned, dialects are a relatively bigger feature in Welsh than in English, and there's quite a bit of variation even within a small area. For instance, on the isle of Anglesey, a common slang term for "microwave oven" is pobty ping (literally "the oven that goes ping"), a phrase I learned from one of my Welsh tutors who came from the island. I was at a Welsh course in Conwy, which is only about 15 miles away, and discovered that my tutor there, who came from that area, was unfamiliar with the phrase (I think she only knew the machine by it's official name of meicrodon, which is a literal rendition of "microwave").
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