Tag: Burns supper

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Favourite Scots words, W-Z

 

From wikipedia.org / Scottish National Portrait Gallery

 

It’s Burns Night this evening.  In other words, it’s been 267 years exactly since Agnes Burnes (né Broun) gave birth to little Robert Burns, who would grow up to be Scotland’s greatest poet.  I currently reside in Singapore and am not connected with the city-state’s St Andrew’s Society (whom I believe organise an annual Burns Supper in this part of the world), so I won’t be celebrating the bard’s birthday in the traditional fashion, i.e., quaffing whisky, listening to poetry recitals, quaffing more whisky, stuffing myself with haggis, neeps and tatties, and quaffing yet more whisky.  However, I’ll make sure tonight I drink a couple of bottles of Tiger Beer to the great man’s memory in my local bak-kut-teh eatery – and will post this latest instalment in my series about my favourite words in the Scots language, the medium in which Burns wrote his poetry.

 

Here, I’ll cover those Scots words beginning with the final four letters of the alphabet.  Actually, beginning with just ‘W’ and ‘Y’, since I don’t know of any ones beginning with ‘X’ and ‘Z’, unless you count Zetland, an old name for the Shetland Islands.

 

Wally (adj) – porcelain.  I believe I mentioned this before when I covered the term peely-wally, meaning pale and sickly-looking to the point where the person so described is the colour of porcelain.  A wally dug is a porcelain ornament in the form of a dog, while wallies is a Scots term for dentures – porcelain was first used to make false teeth in the late 18th century and was still a component in their manufacture two centuries later.  Finally, a fancy alleyway lined with porcelain tiles is referred to as a wallie close.

 

Wean (noun) – a young child.  Wean is a blend of the words wee and ane (one).  For example, Glaswegian poet Liz Lochhead’s 1985 Scots-language adaptation of Molière’s Tartuffe (1664) contains the couplet, “Can you bring the wean up well / When you’re scarce mair than a lassie yoursel’?”

 

Wee (adj) – small.  One of the commonest and most famous Scots words, wee isn’t just used across Scotland but in the north of England and Ireland too.  It’s frequently heard in my birthplace Northern Ireland, which contains its own variant of Scots, Ulster-Scots.  Indeed, so fond of the word are the inhabitants of Northern Ireland that in the TV show Derry Girls (2018-22), James – ‘The wee English fella’ – remarks on it.  “People here,” he cries exasperatedly, “use the word wee to describe things that aren’t even actually that small!”

 

From derry.fandom.com / © Hat Trick Productions / Channel 4

 

Back in Scotland, Scots terms that incorporate wee include Wee Free, referring to a member of the Free Church of Scotland, an uncompromising, purist and, well, wee splinter-church from mainstream Presbyterianism; the Wee Rangers, a nickname for Berwick Rangers, a considerably less well-known and wee-er football team than Glasgow Rangers – how everyone in Scotland who wasn’t a Glasgow Rangers supporter laughed when Berwick Rangers beat Glasgow Rangers 1-0 in the first round of the Scottish Cup in 1967; and wee dram , a ‘small’ whisky, though in my experience, anyone who’s offered me a wee dram has served me something not that wee.  Come to think of it, I’ve heard wee drams also referred to as wee refreshments, wee libations and wee sensations.  Meanwhile, the exclamation “What in the name o’ the Wee Man?” can be translated as “What in the name of the devil?”  And I’ve heard a few Scottish teachers in my time refer to their juvenile charges, uncharitably, as wee shites.

 

Weegie / Weedgie (noun) – an affectionate, and sometimes not so affectionate, term for an inhabitant of Glasgow.  I remember lending my copy of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993) to a Canadian friend during the late 1990s.  When she returned it, she said, “I really enjoyed it, but tell me one thing…  What’s a Weegie?”  Maybe she was puzzled by the musings of the book’s hero / anti-hero, and staunch Edinburgh-er, Mark Renton, who at one point muses: ““Weegies huv this built-in belief that they’re hard done by, but they’re no.  It’s just self-pity.  Ah mean, Edinburgh’s jist as fuckin bad in places, but ye don’t hear us greetin aboot it aw the f**kin time.”

 

And I believe another Edinburgh – or Edinburgh-based – author, Iain Rankin, has written at least one crime novel wherein Inspector Rebus is sent to investigate a case 50 miles along the road from the Scottish capital in… Weegie-land.

 

Whaup (noun) – a curlew.

 

Wheech (verb) – to move very quickly or remove something from somewhere very quickly.  The word features in the Billy Connolly stand-up routine about the mechanism that purportedly exists in airplane lavatories, the jobby–wheecher: a sort of “ladle on a string and it’s tucked under the toilet seat, and as soon as you close the lid…  WHEECH!  Away it goes.”

 

© Castle Music UK

 

Whitterick (noun) – a weasel or stoat.  This word seems to exist in different forms.  In my well-thumbed copy of the Colllin Pocket Scots Dictionary, it’s whitterick.  But in Sleekit Mr Tod, James Robertson’s 2008 Scots translation of Roald Dahl’s children’s book Fantastic Mr. Fox (1970), Mr. and Mrs. Weasel are rechristened Mr. and Mrs. Whiteret.

 

Widdershins / withershins (adverb) – anti-clockwise or in the opposite direction from the sun’s movement across the sky.  This gives widdershins and the motion it denotes the connotation of being against the order of things, of being unnatural, of being unlucky and sinister.  As a result, it turns up regularly in folklore and tales of the supernatural.  In Robert Louis Stevenson’s short fable The Song of the Morrow (1896), when the King’s daughter and her nurse go to “that part of the beach were strange things had been done in the ancient ages, lo, there was the crone, and she was dancing widdershins.”  At the same time, ominously, “the clouds raced in the sky, and the gulls flew widdershins” too.

 

Wifie (noun) – not a ‘wife’ as you might think, but a woman in general.  However, as a conversation I’ve seen on Quora delicately puts it, it’s usually a term for ‘a woman of uncertain age, but probably past the first flush of youth’.

 

Winch (verb) – to kiss and cuddle or, as folk would say during the time of my misspent youth, to ‘get off with’ someone.

 

Windae (noun) – window.  Windae-hingin’ is leaning out of the window, a windae-stane is a windowsill and a windae-sneck is the catch on a window frame you use to open or close it.  Yer bum’s oot the windae is an abusive phrase, basically meaning, “You’re talking rubbish.”  And don’t ask about the politically incorrect term windae-licker.  This landed maverick Scottish politician George Galloway in hot water when he reacted to a Glasgow Rangers-supporting critic on Twitter with the retort: “You badly need medical help son.  Will decent Rangers fans please substitute this windae-licker…?”

 

© The Belfast Telegraph

 

Wynd (noun) – like its counterpart Scots words close and vennel, this refers to a narrow lane or alleyway.  Though most of the narrow side-streets and alleyways that cut off from the sides of Edinburgh’s historic Royal Mile are called closes, a couple of them have wynd in their name, for example, Bell’s Wynd and Old Tollbooth Wynd,

 

Yatter (verb) – according to the online Collins Dictionary, this word’s roots are Scottish and it means ‘to talk idly and foolishly about trivial things’.

 

Yestreen (noun) – yesterday evening or last night.  In Robert Burns’ poem Halloween (1785), the granny tells young Jenny, ““Ae hairst afore the Sherra-moor / I mind’t as weel’s yestreen / I was a gilpey then, I’m sure / I wasna past fifteen…”

 

Yoke (noun) – obviously, this is the crosspiece placed over the necks of a pair of horses or oxen when they’re made to pull a plough.  But in a couple of Sots dictionaries, I’ve seen this described as a term for a motor car.  I’ve never heard it used in this context in Scotland, though I did so plenty of times in Northern Ireland.  An old friend of my father’s once told me that, in his youth, my old man was famous, or infamous, for the cars he drove – they weren’t sleek, fancy or flashy, but the very opposite.  “Aye,” mused the friend, “he drove some right clapped-out oul yokes.”

 

Yous (pronoun) – unlike standard English, Scots differentiates between the second-person singular and plural personal pronouns.  Talk to one person, it’s ‘you’ (or ye).  Talk to more than one and it’s yous.

 

And with that…  I will wish yous all a merry Burns Night.

 

P.S.  This should be the end of my posts about the Scots language.  But, looking at previous entries, I’ve realised there are loads of other Scots words I’ve forgotten to mention.  So, in the future, there will undoubtedly be further entries in which I start again at ‘A’ and try to cover all the omissions.

 

From pixabay.com / © Makamuki0

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Seven reasons why Robert Burns still rocks

 

From wikipedia.org / © Ron Waller

 

This is a revised and expanded version of a piece I had published one January 25th in the Arts section of Concrete, the students’ newspaper at the University of East Anglia, where I did a Master’s Degree many years ago.

 

Tonight, whisky will be guzzled, haggis devoured, bagpipes blasted and Scots-language poetry recited with gusto at thousands of special suppers and get-togethers around the globe.  This is because today, January 25th, is the 265th anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns, Scotland’s national bard and one of its most popular contributions to international culture.

 

Why, more than two-and-a-half centuries after he died at the age of 37, is Robert Burns such big deal?  Here are some reasons.

 

One.  Burns was a champion of the common man.  Born in humble circumstances, as one of seven children to a farmer in Ayrshire, he was much more in tune with the ordinary masses than any of his literary contemporaries.  The American poet Waldo Emerson described him as the poet of ‘the poor, anxious, cheerful, working humanity’.  The fullest expression of his egalitarian instincts was the song A Man’s a Man for a’ That (1795), which was adopted as an anthem by the anti-slavery abolitionist movement.  That, however, highlights an uncomfortable fact…

 

In 1786, Burns came within a hair’s breadth of travelling to Jamaica and taking up a job-offer as a bookkeeper on a sugar plantation – run on slave labour.  Burns’ defenders argue that as a young man at the time, pre-fame, facing destitution, and desperate to get out of Scotland, he probably didn’t consider the hideous moral implications of the job he was about to undertake.  Also, by 1792, he seemed aware enough of slavery’s horrors to pen The Slave’s Lament, which begins: “It was in sweet Senegal that my foes did me enthral / For the lands of Virginia-ginia, O.“  But the issue is murkier still, because Burns’ authorship of The Slave’s Lament has been disputed.

 

Anyhow, later, socialists claimed Burns as one of their own.  A 1929 translation of his works into Russian sold a million copies and the Soviet Union honoured him with a commemorative stamp in 1954.  However, Burns obviously had appeal for capitalists too, for there are allegedly more statues of him in North America than of any other writer.

 

Two.  Burns was a songwriter too.  Indeed, if anything, he is more pervasive as a songwriter than as a poet.  In addition to A Man’s a Man…, he put Auld Lang Syne on paper in 1788 – which, by virtue of being belted out at New Year celebrations everywhere, is arguably the most universally-sung song in the world.  In Japan it is played at everything from high school graduation ceremonies to evening closing-time in department stores.

 

Three.  Burns wasn’t afraid to criticise the moral and religious mores of his time.  His contempt for the censorious regime of Scotland’s Presbyterian Church was expressed most famously in Holy Willie’s Prayer (1785), wherein a supposedly pious pillar of the church prays to God and unwittingly reveals himself as a scheming, bitter, drunken hypocrite.  Particularly pathetic are his pleas to be forgiven for his lechery, which has targeted ladies by the name of Meg (“And I’ll ne’er lift a lawless leg / Again upon her”) and ‘Leezie’s lass’ (“…that Friday I was fou / When I cam near her”).  John Betjeman was so impressed by the conceit that he borrowed it for his 1940s poem In Westminster Abbey.

 

Four.  Burns has a massive cult that keeps his memory alive.  The first Burns societies began to congregate in his honour in about 1800, four years after his death. In 1859, the first centenary of his birth, almost 900 events were staged – 60 of them taking place outside Britain and the US.  Today, Burns societies are to be found everywhere from Rio de Janeiro to Tokyo and from Winnipeg to Jakarta.

 

It’s claimed that the Russians have more such societies than even the Scots do.  Well, in the unlikely of event of Vladimir Putin sticking his head into a Burns supper this evening, I hope he’s regaled with Burns’ 1792 rewrite of the song Ye Jacobites by Name, whose anti-war lyrics include: “What makes heroic strife? / To whet th’ assassin’s knife / Or hunt a parent’s life, wi’ bluidy war?”

 

From wikipedia.org / © Melissa Highton

 

Burns suppers on January 25th are marked by lusty recitals of his greatest poems, speeches and copious consumption of whisky and haggis.  Praised as the ‘great chieftain o’ the puddin’ race’ in Burns’ Address to a Haggis (1786), haggis is surely the only offal-based foodstuff to have a piece of world-class literature written in its honour.  No other writer is commemorated by a yearly celebration on this scale.  Dublin’s James Joyce-themed Bloomsday on June 16th doesn’t come close.

 

Five.  Burns invented the concept of the doomed, decadent romantic poet.  Long before Byron and Shelley were painting the towns of Europe red and proving themselves mad, bad and dangerous to know, Burns had earned himself a mighty reputation for dissipation, both in the pub and in the bedchamber.  His love of strong drink is obvious in poems like John Barleycorn (1782) while his promiscuity led to him siring at least a dozen children with at least four different women – a common jibe at the time was that you could see his face in every pram on Edinburgh’s Princes Street.

 

Six.  Burns is controversial.  And no doubt the arguments that have raged about him over the centuries have helped keep his fame alive.  Much debate has centred on whether or not someone with Burns’ obvious character flaws deserves such veneration.  At the beginning of 2009, just before the 250th anniversary of his birth, right-wing Scottish historian Michael Fry caused a storm when he denounced Burns as a ‘racist misogynist drunk’ who didn’t deserve to be presented to people as a role model.  Fry sounded a bit like a rock-and-roll era parent expressing concern about the examples the likes of Jim Morrison, Sid Vicious, Liam Gallagher, Pete Docherty, Amy Winehouse, etc., set for young people.

 

Seven.  Burns’ work has had a considerable influence on the English language and on English-language culture.  Here are a few examples:

 

Proverbs:

  • The best laid plans of mice and men will go astray (‘The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley’ / from 1785’s To a Mouse).
  • To see ourselves as others see us (‘To see ousel’s as ithers see us’ / from 1786’s To a Louse).
  • There is no such uncertainty as a sure thing (attributed to Burns).

 

Phrases:

 

Burns-inspired titles:

  • John Steinbeck’s novel, Of Mice and Men (1937).
  • R. James’ short story, reckoned by some to be the greatest ghost story in English literature, O, Whistle and I’ll Come to you my Lad (1904) – which is also the title of a 1793 Burns poem.
  • Ken Loach’s film, Ae Fond Kiss (2004) – which is also the title of a 1791 Burns song.
  • The Vin Diesel car-chase / street-racing movie The Fast and the Furious (2001) – ‘fast and furious’ was a phrase Burns coined in Tam O’Shanter.

 

All right, with that that last example, the producers may not have been aware of the Robert Burns connection when they chose the title.

 

© National Trust for Scotland / Robert Burns Birthplace Museum