Fou adjective full
‘“Ken how some men are sweet and loving when they’re drunk, but some get fou’ and it’s up wi’ the bonnets o’ Bonnie Dundee…”’ (An Echo in the Bone)
This comes from Old English full and some people still spell the Scots word as fu’, with an apostrophe representing the lost sound.
An unlovely early example comes from John of Ireland’s Meroure of Wyssdome (1490): ‘Thire fleis (these fleas) … are now fow of my blud’. Gavin Douglas in King Hart (c.1500) writes of ‘Gluttony that oft maid me our fow’ and John Jamieson, the lexicographer, in 1838 defines ‘A Fow man’s leavins’ as ‘A very small portion of any kind of food, that is left by one who has eaten to repletion, or who can eat nothing more. In this case it is frequently said, in a taunting way, “I think ye have left naithing but the fow man’s leavins”’.
As a sad little footnote to this sense, here’s an example of it meaning pregnant in a quotation from Poems by Alexander Scott (c.1568): ‘Fra scho fell fow he fled away’.
However, fou in Scots is very often used to mean full of drink, or drunk. James Kelly recorded a Scots version of in vino veritas in Proverbs (1721): ‘A fow Heart lied never. A man in his Cups will tell his mind.’ And there is, of course, the roistering image drawn by Burns of Tam o Shanter (1790): ‘While we sit bousing at the nappy [strong ale], And getting fou and unco happy’. Interestingly, David M Moir used the word both to mean full and drunk in Mansie Wauch (1898): ‘The violent heat … caused the emptying of so many ale-tankers, and the swallowing of so muckle toddy … that they all got as fou as the Baltic.’
In February 1915, the Aberdeen Press and Journal reported on ‘a conference of the Scottish Temperance League … introduced by the Reverend W W Beveridge [sic] …’ in which some fine lines were drawn ‘As between whisky drinking and beer drinking, it simply amounted to this, that the man who drank whisky, brandy, or rum got drunk before he was “fou”, whereas the beer drinker got “fou” before he was drunk, but he got there all the same.’