The new ebook celebrates the magic, the spirit and the Scottish language – Caroline Lindsay read more
Do you know your bawheid of your ox? Otherwise, we know a guy who can help: Robin A Crawford from Into The Peatlands: A Journey Through the Moorland Year (a Courier eBook of the Week), recently published his most recent e-book, Cauld Blasts and Clishmaclavers, a treasure trove of 1000 Scottish words. .
“One of the pleasures of writing Into the Peatlands finding the languages of the moor,” says Robin, who has been a bookseller in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Perth, Dundee and St Andrews for 30 years.
This special environment and the flora and fauna discovered there can be described in tactics, using clinical or Latin dry terms or artistically in supernatural descriptions of the ‘destroyed heather’ through Shakespeare in Macbeth.
“But other people who for generations have lived and worked in peatlands have their own language to describe their unique delight, which is different from any external interpretation,” he continues.
“So, for us, as Scots, we use English as our primary language, but we also have this half language that we use to describe our exclusive delight in our specific environment.
“I sought to celebrate this language and share it with the Scots and Scots who love this exclusive place.”
Robin began his studies for the e-book thinking about the Scottish words he tries to use or listen to, and then decides which readers would like.
“The e-book is a treasure trove of 1000 words and a dictionary, so I needed a clever explanation of why to include a word,” he says.
“Did you explain a Caledonian resonance that a similar English word could simply not? It had a concept that underlying words would be a history of Scotland and its literature, so there are quotes of resources as varied as Mary Queen of Scots; Dundee of the 17th century Harbor Records and Robert Burns.
So why is the Scottish word so fascinating?
“Like the Scots themselves, our language is a mixture of languages,” he says to himself.
“During the last census, more than 150 languages were recorded as spoken in Scottish households. This variety has been there, woven in Scottish like a thread in a tweed or tartan; words like dirk, a dagger from the highlands come from German; the grain of our Scottish character, our smeddum, comes from Old English; the cup that is played each and every year at Carnoustie Golf Club is Craw’s Nest Tassie, which comes from the old French cup; and it’s worth asking why some other outstanding sporting trophy was played at Murrayfield each and every two years deserve to be called the Kolkata Cup.”
Robin’s favorite words come with the ones we use every day without realizing it, like fankle. “Your tissue would possibly be in a fankle and you can make them all in a fankle (nervous),” he says.
‘Or the old words that have a glorious descriptive force like meevin’ (infested): the soldier returning from World War I takes off his uniform in the open-air bathroom before entering his house because he encounters lice.”
“Some words are just to pronounce. I love the description of the 19th-century poet and novelist James Hogg from the village of Balmaquapple as” … sunk into iniquity up to the throat.”
“Hogg wrote Confessions of a justified sinner about Jekyll and Hyde’s intentional nature of us Scots. Antisyzgy is a Scottish word for this dual personality of intelligent and evil and I sought to express anything in the name of the eBook: Caulking Expressing much more than just cold, blow the howling wind of November or John Knox’s thunderous Calvinist sermon contrasted with the funny clishmaclavers, the transmission of vain gossip, in an ebook!
Robin believes it is vital to keep those words because they tell us about our origins, we perceive who we are, how we live our lives today and in the future.
“In Scotch, bairn is a boy, kids our children, yet the Bairn of The Broons is the boy we all carry inside and the Scot of Burns on universal huguyity” a boy is a boy, because a “who” is magnificently captured in the word “we are all the children of Jock Tamson,” he says.
“In all living languages, words are no longer used. Many Scottish words are connected to an agricultural life that no longer exists, however, words like Bothy, which were once the fundamental shared accommodation of farmworkers, are reborn with a new use as one-room housing for munro-baggers and mountain bikers. The old words or words resonate in the present.
“A kettle, a Dundonian husband who waited at home while his wife went to work. The employment of women in jute factories in Victoria and at the top of the early 20th century: women would be paid less than men for doing the same job.
While writing the book, he liked to locate other tactics to say the same thing.
“I give an example of all the other tactics in which the children’s image eBook The Gruffalo was translated,” he says. ‘In the Scottish version, the mouse (or moose) responds to the creatures it encounters with the replica’ A growl! What don’t you know? “History has also been translated into Scottish dialects and differences show that there is no popular way to speak or write in Scottish and use Scottish words:
Doric northeast: “A gruffalo! Foo, don’t you know?”
Dundonian: “A gruffalo? Yi yi dinnae ken?”
Orcadian: “A gruffalo! Beuy, don’t you know?”
Shetlandic: “A gruffalo! Oh, don’t you understand?”
Glaswegian: “A gruffalo! How, you don’t know?”
Working cautiously on his next book, A Journey on the River Tay from the Source to the Sea, Robin expects readers to appreciate Cauld Balsts and Clishmaclavers as a birthday party of the irreplaceable magic of the Scottish language, as well as the spirit and wisdom of Scottish Words.
“I hope you find your favorite words and notice some that have been forgotten, like me,” he says.
“Perhaps they feel like me as a sour sweetness through old words, listening to them in their memories through a father or grandfather enjoyed that he is now gone. And they will appreciate the dynamism and courage of the new urban Scots, as the poster for this protester Donald Trump’s recent holiday in Scotland shows: “Yir maw was an immigrant, toaster.”
Cauld Blasts and Clashmaclevers by Robin Crawford is through Elliott and Thompson, .9.99.
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