Not so much a Scottish word as a Scottish phrase. My husband claims not to have heard this phrase before, I think he must have led a sheltered life. His mother’s mother was English though and that did mean that he wasn’t taught many Scottish words in the home.
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 isn’t what you would call ancient Scots, you wouldn’t come across the word in anything written by J.M. Barrie or any of the ‘kailyard’ writers. In fact I think it’s most often used in the west of Scotland. It has two different meanings.
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’.
A skellum is a young lad who is a bit of a rogue, a scamp or a scoundrel. It’s usually used to describe someone who’s a bit of a loveable rogue.
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.
Guddle means a complete mess. It’s most often used to describe the state of a room or the kitchen. It’s a complete guddle – meaning the place is very untidy, so bad that you don’t know where to begin with the cleaning up.
Or a person might say “I’m in a right guddle.” They could mean that things are really mixed up. It could be a room or their accounts, letters, e-mails. I’m sure you get the idea.
I’m quite happy to admit that I’m often in a guddle. This is usually down to the fact that I would rather do just about anything than mundane housework. I’d rather work hard in the garden or read, or do some D.I.Y. around the house, and that makes an even bigger guddle!
Clishmaclaver apparently means ‘gossip’ and I came across this word on the internet quite recently. Despite the fact that I’ve lived in various different parts of Scotland all of my life (apart from a couple of years in the wilds of Essex many moons ago), I’d never come across the word clishmaclaver.
Mind you – it doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue. I can’t imagine anyone saying: “Come away in for a clishmaclaver.”
In the tenement buildings in Glasgow years ago women used to ‘have a hing’. They would push the bottom window of the sash windows up if they saw a friend outside, then lean their arms on the windowsill, rest their bosoms on their arms and have a good gossip, leaning out of the window.
I don’t think the gossip was ever of the nasty sort, more just a way of catching up with other peoples’ family news – and who has died recently!
Women always seemed to be worried about their children and the phrase that you often heard then was ‘ma herts roasted’ and my hearts roasted is what a mother said when she was worried sick about one of her children. Does anyone still have a roasted heart? I haven’t heard that phrase for years.
Lulu lived just around the corner from us in Glasgow and she was in my older sister’s class at school and even after we moved from Glasgow to ‘the country’ we often bumped into Lulu’s mum in our many homesick sojourns to the city. I’m 11 years younger than my sister Helen and Lulu so it always amazed me as a youngster that Lulu’s mum was always ‘that worried about my Marie’. Why was she worried? Well, she was married to a Bee Gee at about that time I think and I suppose that could be a bit of a worry.
Anyway, I’ve wandered quite a bit from clishmaclaver to Lulu but I thought I would add this video of her when she was still about 15 or 16 and singing Shout, which kicked off her career.
We get a lot of rain in Scotland, of all different sorts. I think that smirr is the most annoying kind because when you look out of the window it’s very difficult to see it. It doesn’t really fall like ordinary rain and so it has no sound and if you aren’t careful it’ll fool you into thinking that it’s just another grey, dreich day. But if you venture outside in smirry rain and you aren’t dressed for wet weather – before you know it you’ll be drookit, drenched, right through to your knickers! It reaches places that ordinary rain doesn’t reach.
Smirr seems to be a Scottish phenomenon, my eldest brother has lived in the Netherlands for the whole of his adult life and although it’s damp there too, smirry rain is unknown to them.
In Ian Rankin’s book Black and Blue he describes smirr as being a fine spray-mist, which is a fair description I suppose. I’ve always thought of it as very low transparent cloud. Whatever it is – it’s very wet.
Gallus or gallous is what my mother was always warning me that I must not be. Which is a shame because it seemed to me that it was the gallus people who had all the fun in life.
A gallus person is cheeky, self-confident, a wee bit of a devil and as far as my mother was concerned ‘common’. Bubble gum chewing and red nail varnish wearing, if they happened to be female, and distinctly ‘fast’.
They were described as being gallus because it is a corruption of the word gallows, which is where they were destined to be hanging from if they weren’t careful.
Well, it’s really a Scottish phrase isn’t it and it’s what people say when they are feeling discombobulated and troubled about something or someone is ‘getting at them’.
For some reason the phrase is often used by husbands, about their wives of course.
She’s nippin’ ma heid or in English-She’s hurting my head. It means that someone or something is giving you grief, causing you severe annoyance.
It doesn’t always have to be a person that’s causing the problem. It can be a large company like British Gas or BT. The sort of company that keeps you on hold for ages when you phone them and you can never speak to an actual human being. It does your head in, it really annoys you, but I think that there’s no point in letting yourself be bothered like that. Rise above it otherwise the only thing that does go up is your blood pressure!
To be more precise, the phrase that you usually hear people say is – greetin’ faced wee nyaff. Everybody knows that wee means small I suppose, but in this case it doesn’t really have anything to do with the actual size of the person, it’s just to add to the insult.
Greetin’(g) means moaning or crying.
A nyaff is a contemptible, annoying person. Nowadays they would be described in English as being a ned or a bit of a lowlife.
So, there you have it! Ya greetin’ faced wee nyaff a commonly heard insult in Scotland.
Redd up is a phrase which you don’t hear much nowadays, which is a shame. It means to tidy up or clean up. It’s usually used to describe the tidying of a house or garden.
The last time I heard it being used it was a man saying that he had ‘redd up’ the noticeboard in a school. Well, notice boards are usually in need of a good redd up as they’re often crowded with out of date information.
I was surprised to read the phrase in a story by Elizabeth Gaskell the other day, although I probably shouldn’t have been. Michelle from the north of England recently informed me that the word ‘hen’ is still used there and I had thought it was only used in Scotland until then.
I’m now wondering if these words were originally Scottish but just expanded into the north of England with people moving there from Scotland for work. Or have they just continued to be used for a longer time here.
The Elizabeth Gaskell story which it was used in is The Crooked Branch and it was first published in 1859. It has been reprinted as a Penguin Classic in Gaskell’s Gothic Tales.