Scots word of the week

BLOOTER

BLOOTER has various meanings in Scots. the Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL) covers these with some of the following definitions: “filth in a liquid state”; “a coarse blundering fellow”; “a senseless talker”; “a badly executed and unskillful job”; “blootered, drunk”. However, there is one meaning that has become synonymous with the term and that is within the language of football. This meaning is recorded in DSL as: “to kick (a football) with great force”. An example of this comes from Michael Munro’s The Patter (1985): “to kick something (usually a football) fiercely and often wildly: ‘The big defender just blootered it up the park’.”

A decade later, in 1996, a Matthew Fitt poem from Pure Radge gives a lovely description of how messy the beautiful game can be: “oot ther in the soss [a dirty, wet mess], oot ther in the stoor, the ba skyters yin wey, is blootert the ither, a man is cowped”.

More recently, another example from the Edinburgh Evening News (2020) paints this odd mental picture: “Yet, he wasn’t in the mould of a stereotypical Scottish centre-back, the one who’d blooter their granny in the air if it ever meant winning the ball”.

Finally, a luckless player records his attempts at goal .in this from the Daily Record of November 2021: “I was lucky if I scored three in my whole career never mind a few months, but I was always a head down, blooter it and hope for the best type of guy! I think three out of 300 found the net.”

By Pauline Cairns Speitel. Visit DSL Online at https://dsl.ac.uk.