Donner verb to stupefy; adjective stupid, foolish; noun a fool
‘“Ye ken what happened when yon Donner told folk we had jewels here”’ (An Echo in the Bone)
This is an interesting word. The Scots usage appears to come from Old Dutch donen and/or Old Norse duna, meaning stupefied with din. The Old English version just means to make a din or to resound. However, in Scots, dunner generally means a bit stupid.
It can, though, occasionally connote sound to mean unclear or indistinct, as in this example from the Scotsman (January 1912): ‘A youth ringing a cracked half-crown piece on a shop counter said it was “a’ richt,” but it has a “donnert sort o’ dingle” about it.’
J D Scott provides us with an example of it meaning cognitive decline in old age, from The End of an Old Song (1954): ‘… But I’m getting to be a donnert auld bodie. You know what that means? It means an old person whose wits are wandering, you know.’
And, inevitably perhaps, it can also mean dazed or stunned by a violent blow. ‘I got a lick that donnerit me from a lefthanded lighterman [a worker operating a flat-bottomed barge].’ Walter Scott The Fortunes of Nigel (1822). Or, indeed, by the drink … as in this from W D Cocker, ‘Dod aye! I’m fair dunner’t, an think it nae shame.’ (Poems 1932). It’s probably safe to say that shame is implied here though, in James Macaulay’s Poems (1788): ‘Thou lazy, slounging, donart sot!’
Donneration means a ‘stunning’ amount. James Hogg’s telling of his meeting with Wordsworth was recorded in Blackwood’s Magazine (1824) and fairly fizzes with ire: ‘Confound him! I doubt if he would have allowed even Byron to have been a poet …. He thinks there’s nae real poets in our time, an it be not himself, and his sister, and Coleridge…. Na, even Scott - would ony mortal believe there was sic a donneration of arrogance in this waurld?’
Finally, an Ian Rankin character in The Flood (1986) hints at how a reputation for stupidity could actually be useful: ‘You can’t keep anything like that hidden from Matt Duncan. I’m too fly for them, you see. They think I’m dunnert.’