Words and Stuff
A week after Christmas, just before midnight, those of us who are still awake may find ourselves holding hands in a circle and urging each other to ‘tak’ a cup of kindness yet, for the sake of auld lang syne’. We think we know roughly what this means – let’s get smashed for the sake of long-gone times – and we repeat the first couplet and the chorus once or twice before crossing arms and lurching forward into the new year. A few of us may know all the words of the old song that Robert Burns put down on paper in the Ayrshire dialect in 1788. For most of us, though, ‘auld lang syne’ is likely to be our only Scottish declamation of the year.
We may, of course, use some words without realising they’re Scottish. ‘Golf’, ‘trousers’, ‘whisky’ and ‘wow’ are perhaps the commonest; others include ‘bard’, ‘blackmail’, ‘blatant’, ‘bog’, ‘brogue’, ‘cosy’, ‘crag’, ‘glamour’, ‘pony’, ‘shindig’, ‘spunk’ and ‘tweed’. These hardly add up to widescale cultural appropriation. English has probably stolen more from India. And many Scottish Gaelic words have come from Irish Gaelic; others from Norse.
Yet Scotland is the home of many wonderful words. Just start with the place names. From Ecclefechan to Auchtermuchty, from Crianlarich to Muckle Flugga, from Achiltibuie to
Drumnadrochit, you’ll find delights galore (another Scottishism). Look at a map and you may be put off by the Gaelic spelling of the smaller places’ names: ‘bh’ and ‘mh’ do the work of ‘v’; ‘fh’ is silent; so is ‘dh’, except in ‘dhu’. Don’t worry, the spelling has usually been simplified for bigger places, so Obar Dheathain is Aberdeen (Mouth of the River Don), Inbhir Nis is Inverness (Mouth of the River Ness) and Peit na h-uaimhe is Pittenweem (Place of the Caves).
Some words we may believe to be Scottish aren’t. ‘Couthie’, meaning ‘snug’, probably comes from Old English, and the English still use ‘uncouth’. The ‘gloaming’, in which every Scottish tenor from Harry Lauder to Andy Stewart has liked to go roaming, derives from Old English. ‘Burn’, Scottish for ‘stream’, is Anglo-saxon in origin, and still common in place names like Otterburn and Seaton Burn in the north of England. The people there were ‘hagging’ – ‘chopping’ – their meat long before the Scots did the same to their sheep and made ‘haggis’. This most Scottish of dishes, ennobled by Burns as the ‘great chieftain o’ the puddin’ race’, gets its name from Middle English.
English dictionaries are full of Scottish words. A few plucked at random from a page or two of Chambers are ‘gizzen’ (shrivel, wither), ‘glaik’ (flash, trick), ‘gliff’ (fright, scare) and ‘gleg’ (clever, alert). Most are long forgotten. A few are used in England, sometimes wrongly. ‘Dreich’ (tedious, dreary) usually describes only rainy weather. ‘Haver’ (talk nonsense) is misused to mean ‘dither’. The bigger pity is that Scots has so many excellent words that deserve greater currency: for example, ‘bawbee’ (a halfpenny, suggested as the name of an independent Scotland’s currency); ‘scrieve’ (scamper); ‘jink’ (move nimbly from side to side); ‘puckle’ (a few; a small quantity); ‘yestreen’ (last night); ‘vaunty’ (proud); ‘blether’ (talk garrulous nonsense); ‘swither’ (hesitate); stravaig (wander idly); numpty (idiot); ‘stramash’ (dust-up).
The Scots have some awful words, too. ‘Anent’, meaning ‘concerning’, conjures up for me a particular type of pedantic Edinburgh lawyer, and all the legal terms that are his stock in trade. I don’t mind ‘outwith’ (for ‘outside’), but it jars. And ‘fit for purpose’, one of the few Scottish expressions that has caught on in England recently, I associate with the illiberal Home Secretary who brought it south. It’s hard to deny that, in today’s tapsalteerie (topsy-turvy) world, much indeed is not fit for purpose, but Scottish vocabulary is still mostly braw.