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!

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!

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!

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!

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!

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!

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.

Anyway, ‘a’ dodds a gled’ might possibly be Glaswegian rather than a phrase which is used all over Scotland. If someone says:
A wis a’ dodds a gled it means that they were very relieved about something that might have been worrying them. A literal translation is ‘I was all lumps of gladness’ or happiness.

So dodds means lumps or chunks and gled is obviously glad.

Skoosh is Scottish for fizzy lemonade or any other flavour of soft gassy drink. I suppose it got that name because if you aren’t careful with it, it skooshes up all over you.

Skoosh is also used to describe something which is really easy. You might come out of an exam and say, ‘That was an absolute skoosh,’ – if you thought it was really easy.

Or it can be used to describe a job of work which isn’t difficult. It’s the same as describing something as ‘a cakewalk’ or – as we used to say at school – a ‘promenade de gateau’.

Skoosh – it even sounds nice and easy.

A ned, on the other hand is a bit of a bad lad. A hooligan, violent and probably into petty crime. There’s nothing endearing about a ned at all and he’ll likely end up in jail time and time again.