Scots, or how not to speak your own language

For some reason there seems to be a thing going on about Scots, the language, and why we should embrace it. Which is at least an improvement on wanting to reclaim Gaelic, given that we as a majority do speak a form of Scots.

The first I've seen of this new revival is with my children. In consecutive years, the twins have been selected to recite at the Burns' day hoo-ha. The poems were in Scots and I had the boys telling me things such as "flair is Scottish for floor" and other things that, I'm sorry, grated. On the first year, twin one gained first place and received a certificate in English commemorating this. Year two and twin two was third, with a certificate in Scots. "Weel done" and "oor schuil" both irked me.

A week or so ago I saw the end of a programme (presumably only for the delight of BBC2 Scotland viewers) called Scots Schuil, and this caught my eye. To be precise it screamed out "incorrect!!!" in the same manner as the certificate. But I turned over anyway.

This programme made me think. It featured some pleasantly spoken children going to learn Scots, learning about the language and how it has been left behind. At one point they performed a sketch where one of the children was talking about "hunners" and the headmistress was saying "it's hundreds!" (as I would). The parents afterwards were discussing whether we should embrace the Scots language and encourage the use of such words.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. I don't want to stamp out my heritage, but at the same time it doesn't sound nice to me. Pronouncing anything with the "ow" sound - our, town, house - as "oo" instead sounds kind of rough, as does dropping the consonants.

I live in Fife, although I'm originally from Edinburgh, and I genuinely can't pronounce some of the Fife words. While I'd be happy to refer to potatoes as "tatties", I can't form the local pronunciation, which is more or less "toi'ees".

Having placed myself in a dilemma as to whether I should celebrate my heritage and stop correcting "ma" to "my" in my sons, I watched another programme tonight about Scots words and their brilliance.

For all my worries about pronunciation, there is many's a word that I consider absolutely normal that are Scots words:
Blether.
Glaikit.
Scunnered.
Guddle
Jiggered.
Shoogle.
Muckle.
Jiggered and blether haven't been underlined by the phone. Maybe they're not uniquely Scottish?

They're just everyday words as far as I'm concerned. Or not. I only found out relatively recently that you don't get tablet anywhere else, unless it's made by/for a Scot.

There's a way of speaking and a turn of phrase which is pure Scots. Some of which I use and don't even notice, much I find offensive to my pedantic ears.
I conclude that I have my own rules. They work for me. There's no lingual difference in how and when you use an apostrophe though.

Finally, I feel the need to irrelevantly point out that the first line of Auld Lyne Syne is not a question.

Not annoyed

Law of shopping decrees that when you have money to spend you can't find what you want. Very annoying.

Anti annoyance #1 today was the imagining of a needed pair of trousers and Next - the shop for which I have gift vouchers to spend - having the exact trousers imagined, even when tried on. Purchase made, and the trousers didn't go horrid when in the harsh real light of home.

Additional anti annoyance (#1b) was the breakage of sunglasses en route to Next and replacements being there for £6 - double anti annoyance of getting what was needed AND the stocking of summer goods in January being incredibly useful. (Normal annoyance that it is hard to purchase what you need when you actually need it).

Being incredibly pedantic means being mildly psychotic when words are pronounced wrongly. The level of psychosis increases proportionally with the importance of the speaker: people in shops erring as such induce a feeling of superiority; people reading the news making the same error induce a murderous rage.

Pet hate is the pronunciation of the word "controversy". It is marginally reassuring that there are those who consider the wrong pronunciation to be correct and so are offended by the way I say it. But it still rankles something rotten when someone important says it the Wrong Way.

So, watching Newswipe with Charlie Brooker - who is very, very important - a day after it was on, as is the way, there was an enormous anti annoyance when he said "controversy" approximately 18 times in a minute. Correctly.

Naturally had he used the Wrong Way, I would have turned off the television and never allowed him to darken my consciousness again.

Or I might have been annoyed and muttered about it and done precisely nothing except worshipped him a little less. Something.

So. I find myself not annoyed and that's just not much fun. Here's hoping tomorrow consists of the usual irritating annoyances.

More words

Try this, it's hard and it shouldn't be. I got 43 and the ones I missed are so damned obvious. Obviously.

I like words, I like finding the right one, discovering new ones, and I like words that just fit, or that sound good. I like breaking words down into components and trying to work out why that word means what it does. Reading something where the author doesn't just use the same old boring words and uses unusual words, or mixes up words cleverly, always impresses me. I mix my prefixes and suffixes wildly, which probably makes me look like an illiterate fool, but I do protest that I know the right words, I just sometimes prefer the wrong one.

"I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way" Mark Twain

Favourite words:

Scamp/scamper. A scamp is exactly that, a scamp. There isn't any better way to describe it, it suggests you are naughty but in a very nice and slightly indulgent way. And to scamper exactly describes what is being done; if you are scampering, you are not running or crawling or skipping or sliding or anything else, you are scampering.

Kursk. If you are Scottish and you say this, it sounds exactly Russian. English newsreaders that say "Kehsk" should be hung, drawn and quartered.

Catholic. Just because the Catholic church couldn't be less catholic if it tried. Perfect irony.

Pfeffernusse. All German and pfeffernussey.

Champignon. This just sounds nice, but using it as my name has dwindled its appeal a little.

Actually, most of the French language is pretty, "Pour bonne sante, ne fumer pas" is infinitely nicer than "Smoking kills". We should call potatoes "apples of the earth" as well, it's sort of poetic.

Oh apples of the earth, I enboil you.


Procrastination: this is me (not) writing about Transport Policy. Tomorrow I shall mostly be writing about Transport Policy.

Words

Fla. I hate when I want to say something and the words just don't get in the right order and arrange themselves nicely on the page. Why won't they do that? Why do they persist in being wrong, and the same words always keep pushing their way past the more interesting words so you end up with something repetitive? It's not on.

I need word boot camp. Get my vocabulary into shape so the words just slot into useful sentences and paragraphs; off I will be able to go with a flow of eloquence instead of vomiting random words and symbols all over the page.

Word count: 2500
Sense count: 3
Point count: -26
Symbol count: 1543

(In case you wonder how it is possible to make negative points, that is where one waffles so much as to confuse a point previously made. Quite a gift).

I had a point? I lost it, hud on a wee minute while I find it...

Aha! Yes. I'm having a hippy moment, which happens periodically due to something that I am Not Admitting To*, which makes me feel warm and fuzzy for about two days until the cynicism comes lumbering back.

Hippy thought #7: instead of being angry at people for not needing me any more, it is nice to feel useful for having been part of their life when they did need me.

To expand on that requires a better brain than this one. Or indeed a lesser one then I could wax lyrical about hippy shit. As it stands, that's as good as it gets.


*because it's bigheaded, not because of anything interesting.

Hello

Pondering, as I often do, the meaning of words, this evening I got to thinking about the origins of the word "hello". Specifically I was thinking how bizarre the word "hiya" is, one which I often use. Really, it's an entirely meaningless word. So I used good old Google and found various possible explanations. One was that the word was taken partly from the French and was originally "ho la!" meaning "stop! attention! here!". Others are that it is taken from Old English "whole be thou", which doesn't make a lot of sense to me or "hail thou" which is from the bible and would seem to make most sense of all given the popularity of the bible. The telephone popularised the word and theories for this vary from the (bizarre) reckoning that you had to holler down the phone, so you would start a conversation with "holler!" which developed into hello. (I find this unlikely as well, you don't start a conversation these days with "talk!" which would be the equivalent) to the suggestion that the combination of sounds in "hello" are not harsh, tend to be hard to shout and are clear, so they worked well as a greeting. I'm quite sure you can say "hello" aggressively however, or despondently, nervously, chirpily, cheekily etc. Hmm. Say them in your head, I'm sure you'll agree. "Hi" is pretty much just a diminutive of "hello" and "hiya" is quite possibly a diminutive of "how are you?".

So there you go. I answer the phone with "hello?" followed by "hi" when I identify the caller, which was made clear to me when parodied by my sons both picking up play phones and saying "hello, hi, mmm, ok, bye". I was aware of ending virtually all calls with "ok, bye" but I didn't realise I followed the same wording every time I started a call. Better than my mother who says "hello?" in a slightly nervous tone, followed by "oooh, hellllooooo" if it's one of her cronies.

Other words that struck me from nowhere were "passport", which presumably comes from passing through ports, and seagull, which is blatantly obviously a gull that lives by the sea. These didn't cause much thought however, more of a "where does that come from... oh yeah".

CNPS - still need 19.