Tag: Collins Pocket Scots Dictionary

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The gallus John Byrne

 

From National Galleries Scotland / © Estate of John Byrne

 

According to my well-worn copy of the Collins Pocket Scots Dictionary, the word ‘gallus’ means ‘self-confident, daring and often slightly cheeky or reckless.’  Furthermore: “In Glasgow, the word is often used approvingly to indicate that something is noticeably stylish or impressive…  The word was originally derogatory and often meant wild, rascally and deserving to be hanged from a gallows.”

 

So, self-confident, daring, cheeky, reckless, stylish, impressive, wild and rascally?  ‘Gallus’, then, is surely the ideal word to describe the work of John Byrne, the Scottish artist, playwright and screenwriter who died at the end of last month aged 83.

 

Byrne’s art was bright, bold and always good fun.  When depicting human subjects, which it usually did, it wasn’t afraid to tip into the realm of caricature.  I suppose he could be accused of being a little narcissistic, seeing as his most common subject for portraiture was himself – a retrospective of his work in 2022 exhibited no fewer than 42 self-portraits – but then again, if you’re an artist with an interest in the human visage, your own visage, the one that stares back at you from every mirror, is the most readily available material to work on.  Also, Byrne happily treated his own features to the same caricature he did with other subjects, and didn’t flinch from detailing the ravages of time as he passed from youth into middle and then old age.

 

I particularly like this grizzled and extravagantly moustached self-portrait, which has a skeleton attempting a Muay Thai-type kick against his forehead, presumably in response to the sizeable cigarette he’s smoking.  Incidentally, a nicotine yellowness seems to tinge his white whiskers in places.

 

From wooarts.com / © Estate of John Byrne

 

His sense of humour is also apparent in Red and Unread, a portrait of actress Tilda Swinton, who was his partner from 1990 to 2004.  At first sight, it looks like Swinton is dancing a hornpipe in a traditional sailor’s outfit.  Then you notice the large stack of papers her posterior is resting on and the much smaller stack below her right foot.  Byrne meant the big stack to represent the scripts she’d turned down during her career, and the little stack to represent the scripts she’d agreed to do.

 

From National Galleries Scotland / © Estate of John Byrne

 

I wonder how differently Byrne’s own career would have gone if a commission he received in the late 1960s had worked out.  His early work caught the eye of the Beatles and they asked him to create the cover of their next album, to be called A Doll’s House.  Alas, A Doll’s House eventually morphed into 1968’s The White Album and Byrne’s cover was set aside in favour of the famously plain, white one designed by Richard Hamilton and Paul McCartney.  At least, a dozen years later, Byrne’s composition was used on the cover of a Fab Four album, the 1980 compilation The Beatles Ballads.

 

From wooarts.com / © Estate of John Byrne

 

However, shortly afterwards, plenty of other album-work came Byrne’s way, thanks to the patronage of various Scottish musicians: Gerry Rafferty, both solo and with his band Stealers Wheel; Billy Connolly, who started off as a musician who did a little comedy between songs and ended up as a comedian who did a little music between routines; and Donovan.  I particularly like this cover for the eponymous 1969 album by the folk-rock band the Humblebums, a partnership between Rafferty and Connolly.  This contains the song Her Father Didn’t Like Me Anyway, which I mentioned in my previous post about Shane MacGowan.

 

© Transatlantic Records / © Estate of John Byrne

 

Actually, Billy Connolly was a subject who, over the years, would be depicted several times on Byrne’s canvases.  Just three months ago, a mural based on a painting Byrne made of a now bespectacled and white-haired Connolly, and placed on the end of a building in Glasgow’s Osbourne Street in honour of the comedian’s 75th birthday, made the headlines.  Developers want to build a new block of 270 students’ flats on the site and plan to cover up the much-loved mural.  Aye, students’ flats.  I’m sure they’ll look lovely.

 

From twitter.com/Lost Glasgow / © Estate of John Byrne

From arthur.io / © Estate of John Byrne

 

Like the Glaswegian artist and writer Alasdair Gray, Byrne was a man of letters as well as one of images and he wrote for the stage and screen.  Perhaps he got a taste for stage-writing while working as a designer for Scotland’s legendary 7:84 theatre company during the early 1970s.  His best-known plays were the Slab Boys trilogy, whose instalments were first performed in 1978, 1979 and 1982, based on Byrne’s experiences working in a carpet factory near his hometown of Paisley after he’d left school in the 1950s.  In 1979, the original Slab Boys also became an episode of the BBC’s Play for Today (1970-84) drama-anthology series, with Gerald Kelly, Joseph McKenna and Billy McColl as the titular slab boys relentlessly flinging jokes, patter and insults at each other in an effort to prevent their work – having to grind and mix colours in a factory basement – from driving them crazy with boredom.

 

For television, he penned 1987’s tragi-comedy series Tutti Frutti, which helped make a star of Robbie Coltrane.  Coltrane plays Danny McGlone, drafted in to sing for an aging Scottish rock ‘n’ roll band called the Majestics after their original singer, Danny’s older brother, dies in a car accident.  The Majestics are truly on their last legs, thanks to their delusional guitarist Vincent Driver (Maurice Roëves), who believes himself to be ‘the iron man of Scottish rock’ but whose personal life is a vicious shambles, and the uselessness of the band’s shifty manager Eddie Clockerty (Richard Wilson).

 

At least Danny finds solace with another new band-member, guitarist Suzy Kettles (played by an also-up-and-coming talent at the time, Emma Thomson).  As Danny gradually falls for Suzy, the Majestics go from bad to worse and to beyond worse, with in-fighting, humiliation, depression, knifings, suicide and dental violence – Danny ends up taking a drill to Suzy’s abusive ex-husband, who’s a dentist.  Despite the show’s darkness, Byrne’s witty writing makes it hilarious.  Tutti Frutti is surely the best thing BBC Scotland has ever produced.  Looking at the channel’s woeful output nowadays, it’s probably the best thing it ever will produce too.

 

© BBC / Estate of John Byrne

 

A Byrne-scripted follow-up to Tutti Frutti, 1989’s Your Cheatin’ Heart, wasn’t as well-received as the previous show, though it did acquaint him with its star, Tilda Swinton, who’d be his partner for the next 14 years.

 

Meanwhile, reading the obituaries for Byrne, I’ve only just discovered that he also wrote scripts for the comedy sketch show Scotch and Wry, which showcased the talents of comedian and actor Rikki Fulton and featured such memorable comic characters as insufferable and incompetent Glasgow traffic policeman Andy Ross, aka ‘Supercop’ (“Okay, Stirling!  Oot the car!”), and unremittingly miserable Church of Scotland minister the Reverend I.M. Jolly.  Scotch and Wry ran for two full seasons from 1978 to 79, its popularity then spawned a series of specials that were broadcast every New Year’s Eve until 1992, and it became a Scottish institution.

 

And no doubt this Hogmanay, I’ll be raising a glass to the memory of the creative powerhouse that was the gallus John Byrne.

 

From wooarts.com / © Estate of John Byrne

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Favourite Scots words I-L

 

From wikipedia.com / © Tim Evanson

 

Today is St Andrew’s Day, the national day of Scotland.  So, in keeping with tradition on this blog, here’s the latest instalment in my A-Z of the always-fascinating Scots language….

 

Once upon a time, the main detractors of the Scots tongue seemed to be those snobby, London-based, Oxbridge-educated fossils who ran Britain’s literary establishment.  I’m thinking of the furore that greeted James Kelman’s novel How Late It Was, How Late winning the Booker Prize in 1994.  How Late… was written uncompromisingly in the voice of a working-class Glaswegian and its success did not go down well in many posh quarters.  Simon Jenkins, for instance, described it getting the Booker as ‘literary vandalism’, Kelman as an ‘illiterate savage’, and the novel itself as “the rambling thoughts of a blind Glaswegian drunk.”

 

But compare that with the reaction of Britain’s literary establishment to last year’s Deep Wheel Orcadia, the science-fiction verse-novel by Harry Josephine Giles, which is told in Orcadian and which won 2022’s Arthur C. Clarke Award.  Deep Wheel Orcadia has been greeted respectfully, for example, here and here, rather than with the horrified pearl-clutching or bemused mockery that used to be the norm.

 

No, looking at social media, it seems to me that nowadays the folk who bash the Scots language most, and who virulently denigrate people who use it, are Scottish ones – those of a Conservative and / or Unionist disposition.  The more extreme members of this faction profess to be loyal subjects of ‘the King’ (Charles presumably, not Elvis) and staunch supporters of a certain football team in Glasgow.  They also slather their Twitter profiles in Union Jacks and, without a shred of irony, declare that they ‘hate nationalism’.

 

In other words, Scots has become part of a culture war.  It’s been aligned with the Scottish independence movement and the independence-seeking Scottish government at one end of the battlefield; while at the battlefield’s other end, Unionists and British nationalists deny that Scots exists or deride it as ‘slang’ or ‘an accent’ or (at best) ‘a dialect of English’.  Likewise, they do down any sort of Scottish culture that suggests Scotland is slightly different from England and the inhabitants of Great Britain aren’t just a single, homogenous mass.  Hence, you get the likes of Ian Smart, self-styled ‘lefty lawyer’ and ‘Scottish Labour Party hack’, dismissing former Machar (Scotland’s Poet Laureate) and writer-in-Scots Jackie Kay as “a woman from Bishopbriggs, writing doggerel”, and slandering another Scots-using author, Emma Grae, as a ‘white nationalist’.

 

Scotland’s other language, Gaelic, gets it in the neck from these types all the time too.  Witness the celebrated episode where right-wing Scottish troll Effie Deans complained on social media about how road-signs in Gaelic caused her to get lost in the Fort William area.  This was despite the place-names being printed in English as well as in Gaelic on the signs.  “She’s like a post-imperial psychotic satnav gone wrong,” commented one wit on Twitter.

 

Anyway, here’s a further selection of my favourite words in Scots, this time those beginning with the letters ‘I’, ‘J’, ‘K’ and ‘L’.  And Scots is a language.  If you don’t like that assertion, you can stick it up your hole.

 

From google.com/maps

 

Inch (n) – not the unit of measurement but a geographical word with two meanings, both of which turn up in Scottish place-names.  It can be a small island (see Inchmurrin in Loch Lomond, which is actually the largest freshwater island in the British and Irish islands), or an expanse of flat ground next to a river (see Markinch in Fife).

 

Irn Bru (n/adj) – Scotland’s ‘other national drink’, the fizzy, luridly-coloured, non-alcoholic beverage that’s claimed to be both a hangover cure and the only soft drink in the world not to be outsold by Coca Cola in its native country.  I’m not sure if either of these claims stands up to scientific scrutiny, but who cares?  All right, Irn Bru is a trademark more than a vocabulary item, but I’ve seen it used as an adjective meaning ‘orange’, for instance, as in “the Irn Bru-coloured ex-American president, Donald Trump.”

 

Jakey (n) – a down-at-heels, worse-for-wear vagrant with an alcohol dependency.  The alcohol in question is usually either Buckfast Tonic Wine or Carlsberg Special Brew.  The Scottish-based bestselling author J.K. Rowling is sometimes referred to as ‘Jakey Rowling’ by Scottish-independence enthusiasts, irritated at her high-profile support for Scotland remaining part of the United Kingdom during the 2014 independence referendum.

 

Janny (n) – a janitor.  In Matthew Fitt’s  But n Ben A-Go-Go (2000), hailed (22 years before Deep Wheel Orcadia) as the first-ever science-fiction novel written in Scots, the main character works as a cyberjanny, ‘cleaning up social middens in cyberspace’.

 

Jag (n/v) – variously, the painful pricking sensation you get when you touch a thistle-head; a needle-and-syringe injection; a serving of whisky, as in “Wid ye like a wee jag ay Grouse?”; or a supporter of Partick Thistle Football Club, the third football team in Glasgow whose mascot, Kingsley, is the most terrifying sporting mascot in the world.  The adjective derived from jag is jaggy.  Yes, Kingsley is the world’s jaggiest sporting mascot too.

 

© Partick Thistle Football Club

 

Jalouse (v) – to suspect.

 

Jaup (v) – ‘to splash or spatter’, according to my well-thumbed copy of the Collins Pocket Scots Dictionary.  Like a lot of Scots words, I heard this one, or a vowel-altered variation of it, before I even moved to Scotland.  While I was living in Northern Ireland as a wee boy, and whenever my mother was frying something in the kitchen, she’d bark at me: “Stay back or ye’ll be japped by the pan!”

 

Jiggered (adj) – exhausted.

 

Jing–bang (n) – the lot or ‘every last one’, as in the phrase, “the whole jing-bang ay them”.

 

© D.C. Thomson

 

Jings! (exclamation) – a mild and very old-fashioned expression of surprise in Scotland.  Nowadays, in fact, I suspect there is just one person in Scotland who still says “Jings!”  That is Oor Wullie, the dungaree-clad, bristly-haired juvenile delinquent from the Sunday Post comic strip of the same name.

 

Jobby (n) – a turd.  A word much loved by Billy Connolly, as in his routine about the mechanism that expels faecal matter underneath airplane toilets, the jobby–wheecher.  (Wheech means to remove something quickly and suddenly.)  Incidentally, another Scottish term for excrement found in this region of the alphabet is keech.

 

Jouk (v) – to duck or dodge.  A nice story I’ve heard is that this word found its way to the American south.  There, a juke joint became a roughhouse dancing venue where people had to keep jouking this way and that to avoid punches, bottles, etc., thrown on the dance floor.  In turn, this led to the machines that played records of the music you heard at such places being called jukeboxes.

 

From unspash.com / © Max Tcvetkov

 

Keek (v) – to peep or glance at something.  The derivative keeker refers not, as you might expect, to a peeping Tom, but to a black eye.

 

Ken (v) – to know.  Meanwhile, the adjective kenspeckle means ‘well-known’.

 

Kent yer faither! (idiom) – “(I) knew your father!”  In other words, “Don’t give yourself airs and graces because you’re from humble stock, same as the rest of us.”  I’ve never heard anyone use this as a putdown, but I’ve heard several folk over the years complain about kent–yer–faither syndrome in Scotland.  They felt Scotland was a place where if you managed to improve yourself and be successful, you then had to deal with a bunch of jealous, moaning gits trying to cut you down to size.

 

Kirk (n) – with a capital ‘K’, the Kirk refers to the Church of Scotland, i.e., the institution representing the country’s once-dominant Presbyterian faith.  With a small ‘k’, a kirk refers to a church building.  In 2008, when George Takei, who played Mr Sulu in the original series of Star Trek (1966-69), married his long-term partner Brad Altman and invited all the surviving members of the Star Trek cast to his wedding, except for William Shatner, whom he famously disliked, a joke about this circulated in Scotland.  The punchline went: “The Kirk doesn’t approve of gay marriage anyway.”

 

From wikipedia.org / © NBC

 

Laldy (n) – ‘your all’.  The expression “Gie it laldy!” has been bellowed from the touchline of many a Scottish sports field.

 

Leid (n) – a language.  Thus, this entry is about the ‘gid Scots leid’.

 

Links (n) – defined in the Free Dictionary as ‘relatively flat or undulating sandy turf-covered ground usually along a seashore.’  A links can also refer to a golf course positioned on such terrain.  For example, eastern Edinburgh has Leith Links and Fife has Lundin Links.  In fact, Ruth Davidson, the tank-loving honorary colonel who used to lead the Scottish Conservative Party, was ennobled not so long ago and she chose for herself the title of ‘Baroness Davidson of Lundin Links’.  Although I prefer to call her: ‘Her Royal Highness Baroness Colonel Tank-Commander Ruth Davidson of Jar-Jar Binks’.

 

Loon (n) – a word common in North-East Scotland, equivalent to laddie, just as the North-Eastern quine is equivalent to lassie.  When I was out drinking as a young guy in Aberdeen, my Aberdonian pal George Boardman would cheerily cry at the end of the evening, “See ye later, loon!”

 

Loup (v) – to jump.

 

Lugs (n) – ears.  I’ve heard more than one person, after being subjected to someone else’s haranguing or moaning, retort: “Quit burnin ma lugs!”

 

Lum (n) – a chimney.  Some years ago, the Guardian reviewed a collection of short stories by the late Scottish author Alasdair Gray and the reviewer complained about the number of typos in the book.  He cited as an example ‘Edinburgh lums’, which he assumed was a misprint of ‘Edinburgh slums’.  But no, Gray was actually referring to the smoky chimneys of the Scottish capital.

 

From unsplash.com / © Uwe Conrad

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Favourite Scots words, A-C

 

From the Scottish National Portrait Gallery

 

Today, November 30th, is Saint Andrew’s Day, the national day of Scotland.  To mark it, I’d like to post something about a favourite topic of mine, the Scots language.  And yes, the way that non-Gaelic and non-posh Scots have spoken for centuries has been classified as a language, a separate one from ‘standard’ English, by organisations like the EU and linguistic resources like Ethnologue.

 

Sadly, I think that Scots is now living on borrowed time.  It’s not likely to expire due to the disapproval of educators who dismiss it as a debased dialect (or accent) of standard English and regard it as the ‘wrong’ way to speak, although their hostility certainly didn’t help its status in the past.  No, the fatal damage to Scots has probably been inflicted by television, exposing Scottish kids to a non-stop diet of southern-England programming and conditioning them to speak in Eastenders-style Mockney or, worse, in bland, soulless ‘Estuary English’.

 

Personally, I love listening to and reading Scots.  Here are my favourite Scots words starting with the letters ‘A’, ‘B’ and ‘C’ that I’d be sad to see slip into linguistic extinction.  Most of the definitions given come from my heavily used copy of the Collins Pocket Scots Dictionary.

 

Agley (adv) – wrong, askew.  The saying, ‘The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry’ (which provided John Steinbeck with the title of his second-most famous novel) is an anglicised version of lines from the poem To a Mouse by Scotland’s greatest bard Robert Burns: “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft agley.”

 

Aiblins (adv) – perhaps.  The late, great Glaswegian writer Alasdair Gray borrowed this word for the surname of the title character in his short story Aiblins, which appeared in the collection The Ends of Our Tethers (2003).  This is about a creative writing professor being tormented by an eccentric student called Aiblins who is, perhaps, a literary genius or is, perhaps, just a fraud.

 

Avizandum (noun) – a word in Scots law meaning, to quote the Collins Pocket Scots Dictionary, ‘a judge’s or court’s consideration of a case before giving judgement’.  Avizandum is also the name of a bookshop on Edinburgh’s Candlemaker Row specialising in texts for Scottish lawyers and law students.  Not being a lawyer, I’ve never had cause to go into Avizandum-the-shop, but I do think it’s the most majestically titled bookstore in Scotland.

 

 

Bairn (n) – a baby or young child.  I once saw an episode of Star Trek (the original series) in which Scotty lamented, after Mr Spock had burned out his engines in some ill-advised space manoeuvre, “Och, ma poor wee bairns!”  So I guess this Scots word is safe until the 23rd century at least.  Also, the Bairns is the nickname of Falkirk Football Club, so it shouldn’t be dying out in Falkirk anytime soon, either.

 

Bahookie (n) – rump, bum, backside, ass or, to use its widely-deployed-in-Scotland variant, arse.

 

Bampot (n) – a foolish, stupid or crazy person.  During the documentary Big Banana Feet (1976), about Billy Connolly doing a stand-up tour of Ireland, Connolly responds to a heckler with the gruff and memorable putdown, “F**king bampot!”

 

Bawbag (n) – literally a scrotum, but normally, to quote the online Urban Dictionary site, ‘a derogatory name given to one who is annoying, useless or just plain stupid.’  Thus, when former United Kingdom Independence Party leader Nigel Farage steamed into Edinburgh in May 2013 in a bid to raise UKIP’s profile north of the border, he ended up besieged inside the Canon’s Gait pub on the Royal Mile by a horde of anti-racism protestors who chanted, “Nigel, ye’re a bawbag / Nigel, ye’re a bawbag / Na, na, na, hey!”

 

Bertie Auld (adj), as in “It’s Bertie Auld tonight!” – rhyming slang for cauld, the Scottish pronunciation of ‘cold’.  Bertie Auld was a Scottish footballer who played for Celtic, Hibernian, Dumbarton and Birmingham City and whose finest hour was surely his membership of the Lisbon Lions, the Celtic team that won the European Cup in 1967.

 

Bide (v) – to live.  Derived from this verb is the compound noun bidie-hame, which refers to a partner whom the speaker is living with but isn’t actually married to.

 

Blether (v) – to talk or chatter.  Journalist, editor and Rupert Murdoch’s one-time right-hand-man Andrew Neil used this word a lot while he was editor-in-chief at Scotsman publications.  He was forever fulminating against Scotland’s blethering classes – the equivalent of the ‘chattering classes’ in England who were so despised at the time by the English right-wing press, i.e. left-leaning middle-class people who spent their time holding dinner parties, drinking Chardonnay and indulging in airy-fairy political discussion about how Britain should have a written constitution, proportional representation, devolution, etc.  Then, however, Neil started working for the BBC in London and suddenly all his references to blethering ceased.

 

Boak (v / n) – to vomit / vomit, or something unpleasant enough to make you want to vomit.  One of those Scots words that convey their meaning with a near-onomatopoeic brilliance.  In his stream-of-consciousness novel 1982 Janine, Alasdair Gray – him again – represents the main character throwing up simply by printing the word BOAK across the page in huge letters.

 

From pinterest.co.uk

 

Bowffin’ (adj) – smelling strongly and unpleasantly.  Once upon a time, mingin’ was the favoured Scots adjective for ‘smelly’.  Now, however, mingin’ seems to have packed its bags, left home and become a standard UK-wide slang word – with a slight change of meaning, so that it denotes ugliness instead.  It has thus fallen upon the alternative Scots adjective bowffin’ to describe the olfactory impact of such things as manure, sewage, rotten eggs, mouldy cheese, used socks, on-heat billy goats, old hippies, etc.

 

Breenge (v) – to go, rush, dash.

 

Bourach (n) – sometimes a mound or hillock, but more commonly a mess or muddle.  Charmingly, this has recently evolved into the term clusterbourach (inspired by the less ceremonious ‘clusterf*ck’), which Scottish politicians have used to describe the absolute hash that the London government is making of the Brexit process.

 

Callant (n) – a lad or young man.  The Common Riding festival held annually in the Borders town of Jedburgh is called the Callant’s Festival.  Accordingly, the festival’s principal man is called the Callant.

 

Carlin (n) – an old woman, hag or witch.  Throughout Scotland there are stone circles, standing stones and odd rock formations that are known as carlin stones, presumably because people once linked them to the supernatural and imagined that witches would perform unsavoury rituals at them.

 

Carnaptious (adj) – grumpy, bad-tempered or irritable.  For example, “Thon Belfast singer-songwriter Van Morrison is a right carnaptious auld c**t.”  There’s a lot of carnaptiousness in Scotland and another common adjective for it is crabbit.

 

Chib (n/v) – a knife, or to stab someone.  Considering the popularity in modern times of wearing Highland dress at Scottish weddings, and considering the custom of having a ceremonial sgian-dhu (i.e. dagger) tucked down the side of the hose (i.e. socks) in said Highland dress, and considering the amount of alcohol consumed at such affairs, it’s amazing that Scottish weddings don’t see more chibbing than they do.

 

Chitter (v) – nothing to do with the sound that birds make, this means to shiver.

 

Clarty (adj) – dirty.  A dirty person, meanwhile, is often called a clart.  And a pre-pubescent boy who avoids soap, shampoo, showers and clean socks and underwear, like Pig Pen used to do in the Charlie Brown comic strips, would undoubtedly be described in Scotland as a wee clart.

 

Cleek (v) – to hook, catch or capture.  It’s also a noun denoting a large type of hook, especially the gaffe used by fishermen, and poachers, when landing fish.  At least once, in my hometown next to the salmon-populated River Tweed, a cleek has also been used as an offensive weapon.

 

From en.wikipedia.org

 

Cloots (n) – a plural noun meaning hooves.  By extension, Cloots came to be a nickname for the world’s most famous possessor of a pair of hooves, Auld Nick, a.k.a. the Devil.  In his poem Address to the Deil, Robert Burns not only mocks Auld Nick but brags that, despite his wild and wanton behaviour in this present life, he’ll escape the fiend’s clutches and avoid going to hell: “An’ now, auld Cloots, I ken ye’re thinkin’ / A certain bardie’s rantin’, drinkin’ / Some luckless hour will send him linkin’ / To your black pit / But faith! he’ll turn a corner jinkin’ / An’ cheat ye yet.”

 

Clype (n) – a contemptible sub-species of schoolchild, i.e. the type who’s always running to the teachers and telling tales on his or her schoolmates.

 

Colliebuckie (n) – a piggy-back.  Scottish playgrounds once echoed with cries of “Gie’s a colliebuckie!”

 

Corbie (n) – a crow or raven.  The knowledgeable Australian musician / singer / writer Nick Cave uses this word at the beginning of his gothic novel And the Ass Saw the Angel, which has a couple of ‘sly corbies’ circling in the sky above the dying hero.

 

Cowpt (adj) – overturned, fallen-over.  Often used to describe sheep when they fall onto their backs, can’t get up again and run the risk of breaking their spines.  Around where I live, there’s a story of a young farmer who was about to get married and, just before his stag party in Edinburgh, was collected at his farmhouse by a coachload of his mates.  As the coach was driving away from the farm, someone on board spotted a cowpt ewe in one of the fields.  Jocularly, the young farmer told the coach-driver to manoeuvre the vehicle off the road, into the field and across to the spot where the unfortunate beast was on its back, which he did.  The young farmer got out and put the cowpt ewe on its feet again; but meanwhile all the other sheep in the field, seeing the coach and not knowing the difference between it and a tractor carrying a load of hay, flocked around it expecting to be fed.  That left the stag-party and their transport marooned amidst a sea of woolly white fleeces.

 

I’ll return to this topic in this blog and cover further letters of the alphabet.

 

© Viz Unicorn Entertainment / Brent Walker