John Clare uses "brimble" as his preferred form for bramble in his Northamptonshire dialect poems, signaling his authenticity as a voice of the rural working class rather than a poetaster imitating pastoral conventions; A poet drawing on regional dialect might write "the brimble caught her skirt as she passed the old hedge-bank, drawing blood as freely as any thorn in a more refined garden"; The dialectal form "brimble" rather than "bramble" marks a poem as belonging to a specific linguistic community — the agricultural workers of southern and western England for whom this was the natural word; In verse that celebrates the particularity of regional speech, brimble functions as a shibboleth — a word that identifies the speaker as belonging to a specific place and class, not a generic pastoral poet but a person from a particular field and hedgerow; Clare's use of brimble alongside other dialect terms like "crizzle" and "pooty" creates a linguistic landscape as specific as his physical landscape, the poem's vocabulary itself mapping the particular terrain of Helpston; The slight unfamiliarity of brimble to most modern readers creates a productive defamiliarization — the reader must work slightly to recognize the plant, experiencing a small version of the linguistic distance that separates contemporary readers from the rural world Clare inhabited.