Fash verb trouble, vex, inconvenience
‘“Dinna fash yourself, Sassenach. Ye canna say more than ye know.”’ (Dragonfly in Amber)
Fash has altered little in meaning over the centuries and is found in northern English dialects as well as Scots. It is most often used in phrases like ‘dinna fash yersel’ (don’t trouble/bother/worry yourself), and appeared reassuringly in a comment in the Scotsman in 2003 about the possibility of labelling groceries in Scots: ‘Dinna fash, Scottish supermarkets could have signs saying tatties, neeps, sybies [scallions or spring onions], kail and cebbok [a cheese]’. Hugh MacDiarmid used it in a comment on language and identity in A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926): ‘And let the lesson be to be yersel’s, Ye needna fash gin it’s to be ocht else’.
Fash is recorded in Scottish sources from the sixteenth century onwards and is borrowed from the medieval French verb fascher. In Ninian Winӡet’s sixteenth-century religious writings, Certane Tractates (1562), we are told that ‘Heretikis ar euir desyrous of nouelteis, and fascheit of antiquitie’ [heretics are always after the new and troubled by the old].
Fasherie is a related noun, also used of trouble, annoyance or unnecessary ornamentation. The Glasgow Burgh Records of 1662 sagaciously noted the ‘great truble and fasharie that is amongst neighboures for want of copper monye’. Since then, though, fasherie seems to have been restricted to occasional literary use. Ellie McDonald, channelling Hamlet in The Gangan Fuit (1991), writes: ‘Tae win awa, tae courie [snuggle] doun, tae courie doun, aiblins [perhaps] tae dream aye that’s the fasherie [trouble]’.
Here's one we think Diana Gabaldon might query - from Neil Munro: ‘I thought him unco tousy [unkempt] in the kilts for the girls to make such a fash about’ … (New Road 1914). There’s more than one way to lose your troosers though. So finally, here are wise words from one of Neil Munro’s early twentieth-century short stories, published in the anthology Erchie and Jimmy Swan (1993): ‘The thing is to have your galluses [trouser braces] right, and then ye needna fash about your dignity’.