Sunday, June 28, 2015

Glaikit and Other Scottish Vernacular

Glaikit is a Scottish word meaning stupid, foolish, thoughtless or vacant. Here it's specified as being used often "of gadgies, minkers and schemies". It seems these nouns are used for people characterised by a lack of intellect, dress sense and money, and generally living in the Central Belt (the area of highest population density in Scotland, including Glasgow and Edinburgh, among others). They are not very kindly described in the above link, and a similar term, "midgie raker", is described as being "a manky, mingin, barkit, bastirt gadgie". From what I could tell, most of those words mean "smelly"!
I highly recommend skimming through the rest of the Scottish Vernacular Dictionary - it's hilarious and wonderful! I particularly like this entry:

Cow:
The worst, the VERY WORST insult you can give a Scots woman is to call her a cow. All other sweary words pale into insignificance beside this most-powerful of derogatory terms.
"Please Miss Magrit-Anne said a bad word"
"What did she say Condoleeza?, you can spell it out if you don't want to swear."
"She said ah wis a fuckin C.O.W. Miss."

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