Scottish words: widdershins

6 May 2012 00:08

Evee mentioned recently that she loved the Scottish word widdershins and I agreed with her, but I realised that I didn’t explain what it means, so here goes.

Widdershins or as it is sometimes written withershins is Scottish for anti-clockwise or counter-clockwise as some people say it. It’s sometimes used in astronomy as it literally means against the course of the sun.

Anything widdershins is deemed to be bad luck as witches were supposed to walk round their cauldrons that way, but we always go widdershins round the local park because it just doesn’t feel right going clockwise.

It was once used if you wanted to say that something is the opposite way of what is deemed to be normal, or as people tend to say nowadays – something which is counter-intuitive.

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Scottish words: tapsalteerie

22 April 2012 00:12

I had intended doing a book post tonight but if I want to get any actual reading done – which I do – it’ll just have to be a quick Scottish words post.

While I was painting the other day I had the TV on in the background, just for the company, if you can call it that. It was an old episode of the original Upstairs Downstairs and World War I was just about to be declared. Young men were worried that they might miss the whole ‘show’ if they didn’t join up.

Good old Mr Hudson, the Scottish butler was exasperated by everything and he said “Everything’s tapsalteerie today,” meaning everything’s upside down. I don’t know if it was because I was just listening to it but it came to me that the word must derive from topsail and so it originally meant that the topsail was at the bottom or certainly not where it should be on a ship if all is well.

Nobody else seems to have put this forward as a possibility of the derivation. What do you think? Do you have any other theories?

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Scottish words: jiggered

20 March 2012 23:53

I was watching TV a couple of weeks ago and there was a programme on about Scottish words. They asked Jackie Stewart the 1960s/70s Formula 1 racing driver – and several times World Champion – what his favourite word was and he said jiggered. It’s a good long while since I heard anyone using the word and I have to say that it isn’t really one that you look forward to using. It describes something that is broken and an online dictionary says that jiggered is used in the place of a profanity or something rude.

I remember though that we used to say that we were jiggered when we were exhausted and for some reason I had it in my mind that it was used because jigging (dancing) was always so tiring. You’ll know what I mean if you’ve ever been to a Scottish country dance!

Anyway I had a look on You Tube to see if there was anyone using the word jiggered but couldn’t find anything, I did however see this video of women (and a man who shouldn’t have been there) ‘waulking’ tweed and singing in Gaelic. Do you remember way back in the 1960s BBC Scotland used things like this as fillers, except the women were wearing ordinary clothes? It passed for entertainment then. Then there’s a ceilidh band called Jiggered tacked onto it, they’re not bad though. They seem to have been at the Viking Festival in Largs.

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Scottish words: poor wee scone

21 January 2012 00:05

My recent scone failure reminded me of this one. Okay so it’s a Scottish phrase rather than a word and I hadn’t heard it before moving to the east of Scotland so I associate it with the Edinburgh area, but I love it.

In the west of Scotland we normally just say ‘poor wee soul’ – which is universal really so nothing very interesting about that and ‘poor wee scone’ is just a more striking way of expressing the same sentiment. Sometimes scone is used as a term of endearment in the way that ‘hen’ is used. I quite like being called hen but I have a horrible feeling that the usage is dying out.

In France they use the word cabbage as a sort of term of endearment really. Who said the French were romantic?!

In Germany I think it’s usually just babies which are described as little snails. Well I’ve seen some scary looking babies in my day but that’s taking it a wee bit too far.

I think I’d rather be described as a scone than either of those words, even if I’m a poor wee scone!

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Scottish words: corporation

17 January 2012 00:12

A very good and old friend of mine now sadly no longer with us once said to me that she liked a man with a corporation, because they always look so well set up and wealthy. I had never heard the word used in that way before but I knew exactly what it meant.

It isn’t the same as the English usage of the word corporation although I think it might originate from the borough or town council meaning, as those types tend to get a corporation from being on the council and having lots of beanfeasts at the expense of the rest of us.

A corporation in Scotland is a man’s large stomach. It was seeing our First Minister Alex Salmond’s large corporation looming around a door, stately as a galleon, as he entered a room for an interview on TV the other day which brought to my mind that I hadn’t posted about that Scottish use of the word yet.

Strangely I’ve known a few women who have confided to me that they like their men to have a good corporation. It’s just as well really as so many men have them!

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Scottish words: trauchle

16 December 2011 00:22

I am still deeply mired in domestic carnage. In fact the past couple of weeks have been one big trauchle. The best way I can describe the pronunciation is – the ‘auch’ bit is the same as the ‘och’ of loch.

A trauchle is a long, drawn out, weary experience and that’s what I’ve had recently – what with gardening mayhem, destructive removal me, an electrician who didn’t complete his job, another one who turned up to fix his work and today it was the carpet fitters.

Emptying the dining-room of all the furniture and pulling up the carpet was a helluva trauchle, but had to be done. Then as I was giving the floorboards a last sweep this morning the carpet men turned up. They were supposed to come in the afternoon. That’s the first time anyone like that has been early. I had been planning on taking before and after photos but I couldn’t as they got stuck into the work immediately. I might take a photo of the carpet though, just so you can see what it’s like. I have to say the carpet fitters were great.

Tonight we’ve been putting all the furniture back in and after the third electrician comes tomorrow I can start thinking about pulling out the Christmas decorations. That’ll be another trauchle! I’m not complaining – honestly!

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Scottish words: wheesht

9 October 2011 00:04

Wheesht means be quite, shhh, shut up, stop moaning – you get the idea.

You know that ubiquitous slogan KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON – well the other day I was mooching around in Waterstone’s (I know, I shouldn’t have been in there!) and I came across a postcard printed with the Scottish version of it: WHEESHT AND JIST GET OAN WI’ IT. Or in other words: Be quite and just get on with it.

WHEESHT is often said to children when they’re moaning and girning. Remember to pronounce the wh sound properly when you say it, not w as English people tend to do when a word begins with a wh. It should be nice and onomatopoeic, like whisper!

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Scottish words: stoor, oose and glaur

17 September 2011 00:22

Yesterday I decided that I just had to do something bout the state of my husband’s ‘study’. When we were looking for a house last time we moved he said that he really had to have a study so that he would have somewhere to do school work but mainly to get away from the kids and get down to some writing. So he got a study, quite a big room, and over the years he has filled it with ‘stuff’. He was supposed to clean it out in the summer of 2010, it didn’t happen! Then again in summer 2011 and I did say to him that it was just as well that the desk is right at the door as I couldn’t get any further into the room, so I couldn’t even open the window. His solution to that problem was that he went in and squashed all the things that were lying about the floor into a pile in the middle of the room. So there was a feature ’roundabout’ to be negotiated around.

Being a typical Scottish man he isn’t into cleaning and a whole year can quite easily go by without him wielding the Hoover and expecting him to use a duster would just be asking for trouble. So this is where the stoor, oose and glaur come in. It’s what you get if you don’t dust and vacuum clean.

stoor is dust and general muck, and rhymes with sure.
oose is dust which is so thick it’s positively furry and dust bunny-ish, it rhymes with moose.
glaur is dirt, and it rhymes with for.

The other phrase which comes to mind – and I’m not at all sure if this is a Scottish one is:

You could stir it with a stick.

Maybe someone could tell me if that phrase is used elsewhere. It’s very commonly used in Scotland when a person is appalled at the state of there own house. You could stir ma hoose wi’ a stick!

So anyway, that’s why I went a wee bit mental yesterday and just got stuck into it all. The recycle paper bin is nearly full of such things as lecture notes from 1971-1978 and many books and bits of scientific equipment are making their way to a school science department.

Why there was an AA card (Automobile Association not Al Anon!) from 1981 amongst the piles of detritus on the desk is a mystery never to be solved. We moved here in 1988!

I’m about two thirds of the way through it all now and I can see most of the carpet! I blame myself for being too easy going.

My husband says that I need a right good skelpin’ for saying things like this about him and his study. I’d just like to see him try!

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Scottish words: pokey hat

20 June 2011 23:27

We don’t have an ice-cream van coming around here anymore. It used to come just once a week, on a Sunday afternoon. But when I was growing up an ice-cream van came every night about 7 o’clock and I was often sent out to get whatever people wanted.

Sometimes I was sent out with a jug, and the ice-cream man who was Italian and just recently arrived from Naples would fill the jug with vanilla ice-cream. That was easy, but it wasn’t so good when family members all wanted different things.

In Scotland an ice-cream cone is called a pokey hat. It’s obvious why – turn it upside down and it looks like a pointed hat. It was fine if everybody wanted pokey hats but things got precarious when it was a combination of pokey hats and sliders, which is what ice-cream wafers are called. It wasn’t so easy to cross the road with a whole load of different shaped ice-creams.

In those days Cadbury’s sold cream eggs the whole year round, none of this modern nonsense of them only being available between Christmas and Easter. They used to come wrapped in all different coloured foil too – pink, green, blue, yellow, and for some reason it was important to get the colour which you really fancied at the time, as if the cream egg was going to taste any different in a pink wrapping. The van man was not happy about that!

Those were the days when the most dangerous thing in the ice-cream van was the calories but nowadays, in the less salubrious areas, they sell drugs – allegedly!

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Scottish words: thole

13 May 2011 23:05

If you ‘thole’ something it means that you are just having to put up with it. It might be toothache if you can’t get to a dentist you have to thole it until you can.

If you have to be in the company of a person you really can’t stand then you just have to thole it.

When you married in haste and repented at leisure you used to have to thole it but now you can just get a divorce.

Thole is to bear or stand something.

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