This Is Scots @thescotslanguage - Tumblr Blog

Gid wi wid by Scots Language Centre Via Flickr: This jyner’s van wis seen in Dumfaurlin (‘Dunfermline’) in Fife. A jyner is a body that wirks wi wid. The Inglis for gid wi wid is “good with wood.” Photie taen bi John Macfarlane.

#reblog

scotianostra

Back tae the man himsel, I sometimes use the Scots tongue when posting here and on my Facebook page, now and then one of my extended family in Somerset jokingly question what I have posted. Well in 1791 Burns penned a response to a recent review, that criticised a supposed abundance of “obscure language” and “imperfect grammar” in Burns’s poetry, it’s a perfect retort and quite a put down I think you will agree. Nowadays we just call the wankers Grammar Nazis or the like!!

Ellisland, 1791. Dear Sir: Thou eunuch of language; thou Englishman, who never was south the Tweed; thou servile echo of fashionable barbarisms; thou quack, vending the nostrums of empirical elocution; thou marriage-maker between vowels and consonants, on the Gretna-green of caprice; thou cobler, botching the flimsy socks of bombast oratory; thou blacksmith, hammering the rivets of absurdity; thou butcher, embruing thy hands in the bowels of orthography; thou arch-heretic in pronunciation; thou pitch-pipe of affected emphasis; thou carpenter, mortising the awkward joints of jarring sentences; thou squeaking dissonance of cadence; thou pimp of gender; thou Lyon Herald to silly etymology; thou antipode of grammar; thou executioner of construction; thou brood of the speech-distracting builders of the Tower of Babel; thou lingual confusion worse confounded; thou scape-gallows from the land of syntax; thou scavenger of mood and tense; thou murderous accoucheur of infant learning; thou ignis fatuus, misleading the steps of benighted ignorance; thou pickle-herring in the puppet-show of nonsense; thou faithful recorder of barbarous idiom; thou persecutor of syllabication; thou baleful meteor, foretelling and facilitating the rapid approach of Nox and Erebus. R.B.

thescotslanguage

My queue has run dry once again and I’ve been busy having a minor mental breakdown, so enjoy this post from one if the best Scots blogs on tumblr and happy Burns Night to everyone. I’ll try to be less awful soon.

#reblog #scots language