AS the tail-end of Storm Corrie leaves tempestuous winds swirling across Scotland, The National looked at some of the best Scots rough weather words – for when “windy” just won’t cut it.
As careers and ways of life have generally moved indoors over time, the everyday vernacular for describing weather conditions has decreased naturally with this lifestyle shift.
Languages are living entities and are always evolving to serve the purpose of their speakers, however, the Scots language contains a rich and useful plethora of words and expressions which can be used to capture an exact type of weather condition at an exact moment in time.
A tree “made soft by lightening” can be described as “cardmudgelt”, snow lifted from the ground by the wind is a “yird-drift”, and lowering, threatening rain is “heavy-heartit”.
READ MORE: The origins of Scots: How Irish Gaelic, Anglo-Saxon and Dutch influenced our speech
Dr Amanda Thomson’s A Scots Dictionary of Nature, published by Saraband in 2018, does the work of compiling hundreds of Scots nature words in one place in chapters split into words for "Land", "Wood", "Weather", "Birds", "Water" and "Walking".
Thomson is a researcher, visual artist, and writer, and lectures at the Glasgow School of Art.
The profile on her says: “Her work on place in general, is the idea that places are multi-layered, ever-changing, embodied and active, containing complex ecological, sensorial and physical histories and presences.”
Thomson's dictionary collates words found in John Jamieson’s A Dictionary of The Scottish Language, published in 1846, the Supplement to Jamieson’s Scottish Dictionary, published in 1887, and a copy of the Scots Dialect Dictionary, edited by Alexander Warrack and published in 1911.
READ MORE: Origins of Scots: How Irish Gaelic, Anglo-Saxon and Dutch influenced Scotland's speech
Thomson writes in her introduction that in studying these words, she “began to think about how we discover places by moving through them; and how places themselves (and what we’re doing in them) dictate how we move.”
This article takes a look at 10 evocative words to use when the wind picks up and the rain clouds gather:
1 – Blirtie
(adj) Inconstant, “a blirtie day”, occasionally severe blasts of wind and rain
2 – Blout
(n) The sudden breaking of a storm; a sudden fall of rain, hail or snow, accompanies with noise, as in “a blout of foul weather”
3 – Deasie
(adj) Cold, raw, and uncomfortable
4 – Doister
(n) A storm from the sea
5 – Evendoun
(adj) Denoting a very heavy fall of rain
6 – Fissle
(v) To make a rustling noise, as the wind when it shakes the leaves of trees
7 – Gouling
(adj) A term applied to stormy weather; one marked by strong wind, as in “a gouling day”
8 – Kittle
(v) When the wind rises; beginning to rise, as in “beginning to kittle”
9 – Lunkieness
(n) Oppressiveness of atmosphere Ramballiach (adj) - tempestuous, a stormy day
10 – Ramballiach
(adj) Tempestuous, a stormy day
You can buy Dr Amanda Thomson's A Scots Dictionary of Nature from Saraband here.
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