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As well as meaning ‘boring’, I’ve heard ‘long’ used to mean ‘taking a long time’ (‘This bus is long’), as well as ‘(for) a long time’ (‘I’ve been waiting long’). I’ve also heard ‘time’ used this way, as in ‘I’ve been waiting time’. It’s used that way in Coventry at least. Can we prove this and get it in the article?Overlordnat1 (talk) 22:50, 13 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Update: I heard “this service is long” instead of “this service is slow” or “this service is taking a long time” on Eastenders on 02/08/2021. Overlordnat1 (talk) 16:58, 4 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Further update: since posting this last, I’ve noticed further examples of such speech in both Man Like Mobeen and Top Boy, in Top Boy, one character even uses long to mean something like bullshit or ridiculous/stupid - it was something along the lines of “You want me to merk him? That’s long!” - in other words, it would be stupid to kill the intended victim lest it should lead to spending one’s life behind bars or being assassinated in a reprisal attack. Overlordnat1 (talk) 00:18, 11 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Some standard words used in non-standard ways that could be mentioned
In MLE people often use standard words like come and still in strange ways such as always saying ‘Come!’ instead of the standard ‘Come on!’ or ‘Come off it!’ and ending sentences with ‘still’ for emphasis, even to the point of making the word still louder and longer than the rest of the sentence, even when it’s not actually used with the standard meaning of however. Examples of such speech abound in Top Boy and I’ve also heard it IRL. Overlordnat1 (talk) 00:12, 11 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
‘pattern’ is used repeatedly in TopBoy to mean ‘recruit into a criminal organisation for a stated purpose’ or ‘arrange/order criminal actions’, so something like ‘Let’s pattern some yute man to slang our food’ would mean ‘Let’s recruit/order some youths to sell our drugs’. In Man Like Mobeen, pattern is used once or twice to mean ‘arrange/organise’ in a non-criminal context. I’ve reverted the bot’s wrongful deletion of this meaning. Though it was unsourced, it should simply have been tagged ‘citation needed’, so that’s what I’ve done. I’ll try to find sources myself and add them. Overlordnat1 (talk) 07:53, 18 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Certainly influenced by creole languages (particularly Caribbean, Jamaican in particular), but current scholarship does not define MLE as a creole language in and of itself. HarrySONofBARRY (talk) 01:21, 11 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
