Boughten

[Michael Quinion]

The leader of the Conservative Party, David Cameron (Eton and Oxford), was
visiting a big bakery in Bolton last week. He made a joke about his
failure to make his own bread: "So it'll be back to boughten loaves in
future." This adjective (meaning shop-bought) isn't known in standard
British English, though it was once in the dialects of southern England
(almost completely defunct now, I believe). I'm wondering if Cameron might
have picked it up in the US. Some newspaper comments I've read suggest
that, though it's known, it's deprecated as dialectal or regional. What do
you say about its US distribution and status?

--
Michael Quinion
Editor, World Wide Words
Web: http://www.worldwidewords.org

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