Megrim noun a whim, caprice, preposterous notion
‘“Miss Jo suffers from the megrims, and doesna sleep sae well as she might”.’ (The Fiery Cross)
Megrim can be traced back to Middle French migraine, a meaning which survives in English today. In Scots, however, it generally means a whim or caprice.
Lord Byron (a descendant of James I of Scotland through his mother’s side) used the word without a hint of irony in one of his Letters: ‘I really thought, she treated him … with a due portion of conjugal contempt, but I dare say this was only the megrim of a Misogynist.’
Staying with poets, according to Hew Ainslie’s Pilgrimage to the Land of Burns (1892) the arts are a good way to invite and disperse whims and fancies safely: ‘Converse with the Muse was a safety valve that permitted escapement of megrins [sic].’
Almost a century earlier, a writer for the Scots Magazine of 1806 recorded this rhyming complaint: ‘A deep, a dungeon-headed billie, Ne’er tak’ a maigrum in his head, And lay a tax on cheese an’ bread.’
Scots megrim can also mean a disease or ailment. It can be a physical malady, such as an earache - as exemplified in this from the Banffshire Journal (1905): ‘I fin’ the fyakie [discharge] warm an’ snug, I fin’ the megrim in ma lug.’ Lug, of course, being ear in Scots. It can instead be an ailment of mood: ‘Der’r a megerment com’ ower me de day; I can dø naet’in’’ (Jakob Jakobsen, An Etymological Dictionary of the Norn Language in Shetland, 1928).