Grue

A good mate of mine, call him Barry, was having a nip to drink himself better, after spending a couple of days under the weather. As he raised the amber tincture to his lips and caught a waft he grimaced. ‘It’s no like me take the grue to whiskey.’ he winced. What a great word. Grue as in gruesome. The horrors. A bit like boak, to retch. Kind of.

The language in this part of Scotland is particularly rich. The Lothian’s has always been a cross roads. From the Beaker People onwards all sorts of cultures and their languages have passed through, leaving verbal vestiges behind. The Romany and Travellers are fairly recent arrivals but their influence on local vocabulary is pronounced.The phrase ‘barry gadgie’ is a good example. It translates as ‘really nice guy.

These words and phrases aren’t dead. They’re still widely used in everyday speech. But rarely written down. The Scots still seem to have an inferiority complex about the language they use. The modern Scots language is rarely used in the media or the arts at the moment. That’s ‘shan’, a shame.

It seems that homogenised conformity has become the norm, in our schools. But we risk losing more than just a few words. A culture is crucially defined by its language. Look at how many words are ‘untranslatable’. Plenty. A popular word in the Dutch language, a tongue very near Scots, is ‘gezellig’. The closest English translation is ‘comfortable social interaction or space’. But any Dutchman will tell you this doesn’t capture the meaning in their culture.

If we lose words we lose a wee part of our culture. And I’ll be scunnered if that happens, pal.

PS; Almost forgot to mention 'gam'. Just because.