Gomerel noun a foolish, stupid person
‘“Because I do love ye, for all you’re a thick-headed, slack-witted, lack-brained gomerel.”’ (Outlander)
Gomerel (spelt in various ways) is first recorded in Scots at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but it is likely that the word was around for many years before then. It is thought that it combines a verb goam ‘gaze about vacantly’ (for which see Old Norse gaumr ‘heed, attention’) with what is known as a diminutive/frequentative suffix, that is -el/-le. There are parallels with similar words such as gamphrell and gangrel.
Wherever it comes from, gomerel appears in the works of several notable novelists and poets, including Walter Scott and James Hogg. ‘It is best to pit sic a gomerel out o’ pain.’ (Hogg Tales of the Wars of Montrose, 1835.) Later Scottish authors who have deployed it include the Aberdonian writer Stanley Robertson’s somewhat unfilial use in Fish-Hooses: Tales from an Aberdeen Filleter (1990): ‘Aifter aa is said and deen, her faither, big Jake wis a proper gomeral and her mither wis twopence short of the shilling.’
The word has also traversed the North Channel to Ulster, see Sam Hanna Bell’s Across the Narrow Sea (1987): ‘There’s gommerils that have crossed into Ireland whose only ploughing has been a furrow across some guid Christian thrapple’. Bell, born in Glasgow to Ulster parents, is a good example of the Scots-Northern Irish link.
All four citations for gomerel in the Oxford English Dictionary are from Scottish writers, including one from the now largely forgotten Christian Isobel Johnstone (1781-1857). Yet in her time she was an important figure who wrote novels, best-selling books such as The Cook and Housewife’s Manual (1826) and was much admired as an editor of Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, a leading journal of the period. ‘Ye was right to refuse that clavering gomerel, Sir John’ comes from an early novel, Saxon and Gael (1814), published the year before her second marriage (she had divorced her first husband). Johnstone is also credited as an early user of nyaff ‘something small’, albeit with a distinct spelling: ‘What are ye seeking for the piece o’ thae bits o’ gnaffs, my woman?’