Iain Rankin – Blood and Porridge

January 25, 2026

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 18^th 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

December 5, 2025

The big Mc

From wikipedia.org / © Nonsenseferret

It’s exactly a decade since the Scottish writer, poet and columnist William McIlvanney passed away on December 5^th, 2015. Here’s something to mark this melancholy anniversary.

For myself and many book-lovers in Scotland in the 1980s, William McIlvanney was both a source of pride and exasperation. Pride that modern Scottish literature was capable of producing someone as good as he was; but exasperation that the British literary establishment seemed to have little interest in him or his peers (like Alasdair Gray and James Kelman) north of the border. On their radar, Scottish writers didn’t make much of a blip.

Back then, the clique of authors, critics and academics who, through Britain’s highbrow media outlets, decided what was fashionable were a privileged Oxford / Cambridge-educated bunch who lived in London and seemingly lived up their own arses too. I always find it telling that in 1984, when things felt at their very worst, the Booker Prize – the flagship award for the UK literary establishment – managed to have on its short-list five books that had novelists, biographers, literary critics and literary lecturers as their main characters. The only shortlisted book that was about people who didn’t make a living out of literature (you know, like 99.999% of the human population) was J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun. And it didn’t win, though it should have.

The novel that helped put McIlvanney on the map was 1975’s Docherty, which was about a tough west-of-Scotland miner and his family trying to cope with everything that the early decades of the 20^th century threw at them. Thus, McIlvanney was never going to ingratiate himself with the ‘in’ crowd by writing about writers, biographers, critics or lecturers either.

I’d read McIlvanney’s 1977 novel Laidlaw as a teenager – more about that in a minute – but it wasn’t until I was at college that one of my tutors (Isobel Murray) urged me to read a book of his that’d just been published, 1986’s The Big Man. I’m glad I listened to her because The Big Man proved to be one of my favourite books of the 1980s. It features another miner, called Dan Scoular. He’s an ex-miner, actually, because this is the post-miners’-strike 1980s, Scoular has lost his job and he and his family are struggling to make ends meet. The imposing Scoular happens to be good at fighting, though it’s a side of him that he’s suppressed for a long time. Then he’s approached by a Glaswegian gangster who offers to pay him a small fortune if he takes part in an illegal bare-knuckle fight. Thus, Scoular faces a dilemma – does he do something that he finds abhorrent if it saves him and his loved ones from penury? Inevitably, after he ignores his better instincts and agrees to the proposal, he finds out that there are more complicated and even nastier things going on in the background.

The Big Man is the most cinematic of McIlvanney’s books and it was no surprise that it was filmed, in 1990, by David Leland. The film gets some things right. The villains, played by Ian Bannen and Maurice Roëves, are good. However, it gets a lot wrong, including a Hollywood-esque, feel-good ending far removed from the bleak, ambiguous note with which McIlvanney closes the book. Another problem is that, at the time, there wasn’t a bankable-enough Scottish star for the filmmakers to cast in the role of Scoular. So they had to search around and the next best thing they could find was a Northern Irishman, Liam Neeson.

Now I like Neeson, but every time in The Big Man that he opens his mouth and those dulcet County Antrim tones of his emerge, the sense that you’re in a hard-pressed mining town in the West of Scotland goes out of the window. It’s a pity that the film wasn’t made during the years since, when some bankable Scottish actors have come to prominence (though it might be difficult to find one with the necessary, hulking physicality that Neeson had). Incidentally, The Big Man – a movie about Scottish ex-mining communities and ruthless Glasgow criminals – also has Hugh Grant in its cast. I’ll give you all a minute to pick your jaws up off the floor.

A later novel by McIlvanney, 1996’s The Kiln, received a lot of acclaim. It even had a recommendation on its cover from Sean Connery. I’ve just praised McIlvanney for not writing books about writers, but The Kiln actually has a writer as its central character, one in the throes of a mid-life crisis. However, the novel is more a coming-of-age novel because its hero spends much of it looking back on his working-class youth, especially on a period he spent toiling in a local brickworks.

When The Kiln appeared, it seemed to cement – an appropriate verb for a book about bricks – McIlvanney’s status as a major figure in Scottish letters. But it seemed the last time that he commanded such attention. Recently, I was thinking about The Kiln and I remembered reading it while I was making a long-distance bus trip during the only occasion I was in Australia – which was in 1997, almost thirty years ago and almost twenty years before McIlvanney’s death. What on earth happened to him after that? I’d come across an occasional interview with him or article by him in the Scottish press, but that was about it. In 2006 he published one more novel, Weekend, though it arrived with little fanfare – the antithesis of the reception The Kiln got a decade earlier.

Though as far as mainstream literature was concerned McIlvanney seemed to disappear from view after The Kiln, he did in recent years win belated acknowledgement for his work as a crime writer – specifically, for his 1977 novel Laidlaw, which was republished in 2013, and its sequels The Papers of Tony Veitch (1983) and Strange Loyalties (1991). (The latter book also serves as a grim semi-sequel to The Big Man.) All are about a tough but intellectual and philosophical Glasgow detective called Jack Laidlaw. Since then, crime novels set in Scotland have sold by the barrow-load and Scottish crime writers like Iain Rankin, Val McDiarmid, Denise Mina, Christopher Brookmyre and Stuart MacBride have enjoyed lucrative careers, so McIlvanney can be seen as the man who started it all. His Jack Laidlaw was the prototype for Inspector Rebus and the rest. In effect, McIlvanney created ‘Tartan Noir’.

Even when I read Laidlaw at a young age, I found it a bit uneven (as prototypes usually are), its prose shifting slightly uncomfortably between Glasgow-speak and Raymond Chandler-isms. It wasn’t helped by the way it was marketed, either – “Turn down a Glaswegian when he offers you a drink,” intoned the blurb on the back, “And he’ll break your legs,” which wasn’t what the book was about. Laidlaw focuses more on psychology than on violence, and I found it disconcerting that in its final pages the hero isn’t rushing to catch the murderer so much as he’s rushing to save the murderer from gangland-backed vigilante justice. But all power to McIlvanney for inventing what would become Scotland’s biggest literary export. Iain Rankin, in particular, has always admitted his debt to him.

McIlvanney was a political thinker too and during the 1990s – back in those long-ago days when Scotsman Publications produced material that was worth reading – he was a perceptive columnist in the Scotland on Sunday newspaper. I also remember him delivering a speech in Edinburgh’s Meadows during the March for Scottish Democracy rally held on December 12^th, 1992, demanding the creation of a Scottish parliament. On stage, in front a crowd of 30,000 people, he performed far better than any of the politicians in attendance. He memorably summed up the case for a parliament saying: “We gather here like refugees in the capital of our own country, wondering what we want to be when we grow up. Scotland – the oldest teenager amongst nations.”

But at the same time he pleaded for racial tolerance. “Scottishness,” he pointed out, “isn’t some pedigree lineage. It’s a mongrel tradition.” I suspect that with McIlvanney’s speech that day began the emphasis on ‘civic nationalism’ that Scottish nationalists – at least, the decent, mainstream ones, not the fringe, far-right heidbangers – have been at pains to cultivate ever since.

Finally, William McIlvanney played an indirect role in the start of my writing career. My very first short story to see publication, a slice-of-life piece set on a Scottish farm with the self-explanatory title Lambing Time, appeared in a magazine called Scratchings, then produced annually by Aberdeen University’s Creative Writing Society. Scratchings had been launched in the early 1980s with the help of a financial contribution from McIlvanney. At the time he was Aberdeen University’s writer-in-residence and he was approached by two young students who “wanted to borrow 40 pounds to start a poetry magazine. Would he be able to lend them the money?” He did, Scratchings was born, and it provided a home for Lambing Time a few years later.

Incidentally, the two students who successfully tapped McIlvanney for 40 pounds were Dundonian Kenny Farquharson, now a columnist with the Times newspaper; and Invernessian Alison Smith, now better known as the novelist Ali Smith, who’s been shortlisted three times for the Booker Prize – yes, the award whose shortlist bugged me so much back in 1984.