‘Dreich’ tops poll of favourite Scots words (2013) | Hacker News Reader

‘Dreich’ tops poll of favourite Scots words (2013)

scotsman.com

31 pointsMaysonL49 comments

Do not believe Reddit's view of what the Scots think is their favourite word. (grew up in Scotland, 1960s-1970s) The C-word is not actually that common. (I don't mean "chips")

However, if you learn a word from reading the immortal words of D.C.Thompson's "Oor Wullie" or "the Broons" It may or may not reflect reality. To my mind, nobody used "jings" un-ironically but an older generation did use "braw" in its true sense. And the adjective "wee" is heavily used. As in "wee dram" which means "DO NOT STOP POURING THE BOTTLE UNTIL I SAY SO"

Some numpty awa an nicked ma limbo stick oot the shed. How low can ye go...

I always liked numpty but 'the bill' cockneyfied it.

One other important thing to learn about Scots English - calling a woman a "cow" is a lot worse North of the Border.

"Oats is the food of horses in England and men in Scotland. And where do you find finer horses and finer men?"

—An old Scottish engineer who didn't like me because as a wee lad I used to ask him things like: "How do you weigh a grain of sugar?"

Talking of chips, how come Scots can't cook chips? Awful soggy limp things.

Are you comparing them to fries? Chippy chips and fries are two different things

No, to English or Welsh chip-shop chips. The salt-and-sauce I don't mind, but Scottish chips are uniformly awful.

Couldn't disagree more. I've lived in the north of Scotland, the north of England and now I'm in the South of England. Here has pansiest chips of the lot, nevermind the shops at the beach in Bournemouth whose chips feel like they've been fried by English willpower alone.

Well horses for courses I guess. Chips is the south aren't great and you take your chances on pensioner beach, but you don't like north of England chips? I'd rate those as the best. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Northern chips are fine. I was strongly disagreeing with the notion that Scottish chips are the worst.

Where in Scotland were you? Quality varies everywhere in the UK I find but if you want a proper good chippy either go to a real Italian chippy or one of the Fife village chippies.

Mostly Glasgow & Edinburgh, intrigued by the "Italian chippie", that's the same priciple as the "Italian cafe" I guess (ex POWs who hung around to provide the locals with decent food) used to be so common in London, now mostly gone; thanks for the tips :-)

There are just a lot of chippies run by Italian families, particularly in Glasgow. As a general rule they tend to be better than most chippes. The often have Italian names, are family run and do pizza & pasta as well as chip shop food.

The Merchant Chippy in Merchant City, Glasgow. Not a finer chip has been fried.

Crivens! My dad has a pile of Oor Wullie annuals, must be from the '60s when he lived in Edinburgh. I had no idea it was still going.

As a Scot living in London (I left around 5 years ago). The C-word is certainly commonly used, especially in the West Coast where I'm from.

Folk say ct all the time. I went to a very international uni and was shocked by how offended Americans and English folk got by it. Americans also got weirdly offended by saying fk. That made working with them at the start of my career somewhat difficult as it barely registers in my brain as inappropriate.

It's folk in the west who lack airs and graces who say it all the time.

No true Scotsman would use such language so casually. ;-)

Yes I would.

No true Scot bothers with airs and graces.

"the C-word"... welcome to jupiter broadcasting.

Scot here, "cunt" is actually used a lot, but of course only in very informal settings. If a friend does you a favour, for example, you might say "ta, yer a good cunt!".

In general, we Scots seem to have swearing ingrained as part of the vernacular.

Apparently "good cunt" is a New Zealand thing too. I was wonderfully surprised when a Kiwi friend declared me a good cunt.

A better article here, with more fun words:

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-50476008

My personal favourite Scots word is "wheesht", which I grew up hearing, to mean "be quiet now". I'm no longer in the UK, but I still find myself saying it, almost reflexively, to our boy here in Finland. He understands it just fine!

You can also expand it to "haud yer wheest!", which instead is something like "shut your mouth!"

Don't forget that Scots is generally spoken in the south. There is a rich selection of dialects around the country, notably in the the north where Norse is the strongest influence.

http://www.caithness.org/dialect/

When I was growing up it was possible to tell by accent whether someone came from an inland farm or from one of the fishing villages along the coast - even though the farms might only be 1km or so from the villages.

The UK is like that as a whole, the accents and dialect can vary enormously in very short distances.

Even simple things like what people call rolls of bread can place people pretty accurately:

https://i.imgur.com/mwoYYYQ.jpg

I call a small roll of bread a "bread-cake" because that's what my mom called it. My dad would call it a "morning roll". Now I'm an adult I can, and do, alternate between the two terms but I have a preference for my mother's term.

Some words I take my mother's terms and some my dad's. So I guess there's a blending from Scotland and Yorkshire. Now raising a bilingual child who is 50% Finnish who knows how he'll talk, and what he'll call things!

A Scot chief engineer I once worked with claimed you only needed four words in your vocabulary to keep up conversation with a true Scotsman - Aye, Nay, Fook, Shite; if you'd been to university, you could expand your vocabulary with Bastid, too.

After a couple of weeks offshore with him and assorted other Scots, I came around to believing he was mostly right...

I got told off at my first job (in 1988) when debugging a problem on site at a religious book publishers I was apparently cursing without realising it....

I once used the word snib in conversation in England, and got blank looks. I then realized I didn't know the Standard English word. After describing one, I was told it was a latch. Other words I prefer that would draw blank looks are skelf (splinter), bike (wasp's nest), and oose (fluff).

Another Scot here - and I just learned from you that snib and bike aren't used in general English!

I recently discovered Still Game on Netflix. It's been my intro to Scotland :)) It's like watching Golden Girls but with old men, so much more cussing but in a Scottish accent. Turn it on when ever I need a good laugh. Highly recommended.

A Doric phrase that people often find amusing is "foos yer doos?" - it literally means, "how are your pigeons?", and is used as a salutation like "how are you?".

The only word I already knew from this list is "beasties" - once again thanks to Lemmings (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2hQxtvncaQ) - gotta finally visit Scotland to expand my vocabulary :D

I'd probably go with "drookit" as my favourite Scots word - although if we allow phrases I would probably go with the greeting of "fit like" or possibly my mother's advice before exams at school to "keep the heid".

A word that comes in handy from time to time here in Montana since there is no equivalent English word. But I'd place "wairsh" higher in my favorite list. Another word with no direct English translation.

According to Collins the (British) English equivalent is simply 'wersh'¹. Still a Scottish loanword though.

1: https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/wair...

And they define it as:

1. tasteless; insipid 2. sour; bitter

So providing three contradictory definitions in just four words. What do you mean by it when you use it?

It's to do with bitterness and definitely not tasteless. The best way to understand its definition is to imagine two people picking berries. One goes to a new bush, plucks a berry, puts it in their mouth then makes an expression indicating unpleasant taste, puckering. Their friend asks "Nae gid?" they respond "Aye, yon's offey wairsh".

Yes I'm aware of that misspelling ;) Small sample size, but I've never heard an English person use the word and have always assumed it was archaic there.

What about dwam, as in away in a dwam (dreamworld)?

weirdest one I came across is 'oxster' ... means armpit

'piece' means sandwich, and a 'ginger' is a soft drink

I like 'glaikit' (no idea how you spell that) ... it's basically a verb to be a daydreamy, dozy f*ck

"oxter". It's a common word in Shetland (island to the north of Scotland), less so on the mainland.

Piece can also mean small cake, scone, or similar.

If you want a deep dive into modern Scots as its spoken today check out https://www.reddit.com/r/ScottishPeopleTwitter/ if you haven't already done so

Personally I find that subreddit is a cringeworthy series of posts wherein people go overboard with Glaswegian patterns of speech and then label it "Scots". I wouldn't regard it as a reference for how people actually talk.

It's definitely more Glaswegian than generic Scottish but it's also definitely accurate!

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