'Tis the season to be joco

January 25^th was the birthday of Robert Burns, Scotland’s most renowned poet, and it was celebrated with the customary ‘Burns suppers’ of haggis, whisky, and lively conversation. This year there was unprecedented revelry, as the 250^th anniversary of the birth of the Bard of Alloway is being commemorated by a special ‘year of Homecoming’ in Scotland.

The legend of Burns’s personality and lifestyle – and the image that most readily springs to mind is that of a rather rakish ‘ladies’ man’ – sometimes detracts from the value of his poetry. It can’t be denied that through his poetry, Burns did much to preserve the idioms and vocabulary of Scots. Very many people in Scotland, whether or not they are particularly familiar with Scots language, will be well acquainted with words like sonsie and sleekit from Burns’s works ‘Address to a Haggis’ and ‘To a Mouse’.

Not all of the words that we can identify as Scottish are known to every Scot, given the different derivations and regional variation in usage of these words. Cailleach (an old woman) and clachan (a small village) are Gaelic in origin, while quine (a girl) comes from the Doric of North-east Scotland. But every Scot will know some distinctively Scottish words that express an idea succinctly and are very satisfying to say, for example fouter (pronounced ‘footer’, meaning to mess around aimlessly), wabbit (tired out), capernoity (irritable or giddy) and, of course, clishmaclaver.

Many of the words that Scots like best of all are those that have a unique meaning in the English spoken here in Scotland. If a Scot says he is ‘getting the messages’, he doesn’t mean that he is receiving communications from the afterlife, he just means he is going for his shopping. If you ‘uplift’ someone or something, you don’t have to elevate them, but you might collect them from somewhere. And one which bemuses many: if you ‘clap’ a dog, you are not abusing the poor animal or even giving it a round of applause, you are simply giving it a friendly pat. It is such differences in usage that make the English language so rich; all its subtleties would take more than one lifetime to learn.

Mary O'Neill

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Welcome to the Chambers Editors’ Blog!

Welcome to our very first Chambers blog, where you will be able to read the Chambers editorial team's musings on lexicographic and linguistic topics (and probably a few other things besides). Clishmaclaver struck us as an apt title, as the home of Chambers has always been in Edinburgh, Scotland, and clishmaclaver is what is known around these parts as 'a good Scottish word'.

When I tell people that I am a dictionary editor, it usually elicits an enthusiastic response, and not a little envy. To work so closely with words is clearly on many people's 'dream jobs' list, and so I am reminded that I am in a very privileged position. Some of the words we find ourselves working with in The Chambers Dictionary are, and I say this without overstatement, superb. No matter how familiar you become with the text, you still find some new delight every time you venture in. My own current favourites? Tosticated, meaning 'perplexed', and galimatias, a lovely synonym for 'nonsense'.

Making the dictionary available online has brought a whole new dimension to our work as lexicographers. The gap of years before we could add a collection of new material – or even a single new word – is no longer, and now we only have to hold off for a few months before we bring in the latest crop of good candidates. Like the profession of lexicography as a whole, this is a challenge as well as a pleasure, but we have the satisfaction of knowing that we are keeping our dictionary at the cutting edge of vocabulary coverage.

Mary O'Neill

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