Category Archives: Scottish words

Scottish words: wheesht

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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!

Scottish words: stoor, oose and glaur

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Yesterday I decided that I just had to do something about 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 their 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!

Scottish words: pokey hat

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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!

Scottish words: thole

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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.

Scottish words: a’ dodds a gled

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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.

Scottish words: skoosh/scoosh

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Skoosh or scoosh 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’.

Skoosh – it even sounds nice and easy.

Scottish words: skellum and ned

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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.

Scottish words: guddle

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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!

Scottish words: clishmaclaver/having a hing

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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.

Scottish words: smirr

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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.