BEING the kind of place where people like to live, our county has seen a considerable influx of new residents over the last couple of decades, swelling the populations of almost all our towns and villages.

A fair number have come to us from furth of Scotland and struggle with our dialect.

Many of us have made them welcome and shared our culture, including invitations to a Burns Supper.

This, unfortunately, can turn out to be an embarrassing ordeal of incomprehensible ritual.

Though we are in the throes of Burns season now, all such events have fallen foul of the dreaded Covid. However, this lull offers incomers an opportunity to come to grips with the pivotal poetry at the heart of any Burns Supper – his ‘Address to a Haggis’ – in time for next year.

What novices should understand is: a) we Scots are proud of a rich vocabulary of Scots, above and beyond basic English; and b) the pride many of us take in being couthy, i.e. being direct and droll at the same time.

As well as being a poet of subtlety, Burns was a past master at using both to express himself.

The following tries to offer easier access to his less obvious phrases.

  • sonsie = impressive
  • painch, thairm = entrails, guts
  • dught (also dicht) = wipe, sharpen
  • warm-reekin = piping hot and steaming
  • weel-swall’d kytes be lyve = suddenly swollen paunches
  • staw = give pause to
  • scunner = loathing
  • shank = leg
  • wallie nieve = sturdy fist
  • sned = cut
  • nae skinking ware that jaups in luggies = no watery rubbish that splashes into crude bowls. A little study may provide an ‘in’ to this rich, couthy language that makes Burns the national bard, just as patience rewards those who take time to absorb that of Shakespeare.

As Burns might have said: a daimen icker in a thrave o’ time’s a sma’ request.

Given such time, even soothmoothers (as Orcadians and Shetlanders say) may come to understand local salts of the earth, like our farmers and fishermen.