Stramash noun uproar, commotion
‘“And wee Donald had a dram - or two or three or four - too many and was found in a stall wi’ his hand down Mary Finlay’s bodice. God, the stramash there was!”’ (Written in my own Heart’s Blood)
Some like to think of stramash as a happy chaos but, like most words, it can mean different things to different people. It is defined as an uproar or commotion and these can lead to trouble.
We have a record of stramashes in finance (there is little new under the sun). A quotation dating from 1803 in the Three Banks Review (1959) describes: ‘A very unexpected stramash occurred in our Accomptant’s office two days ago’. They can unsettle governments, as threatened in John Galt’s The Ayrshire Legatees (1821): ‘She will raise sic a stramash, that she will send the whole government into the air’. In similar vein, John Buchan in Witch Wood (1927) writes: ‘The folk of Woodilee are ready enough for any stramash in kirk or state’.
In this plaintive citation, from James Miller’s A Fine White Stoor (1992), it appears to mean something more akin to struggle: ‘Maybe he would get married this year; a wife might give some purpose to the whole stramash, someone to work for.’
Stramash also appears as a verb meaning to be rowdy, and we have yet another meaning from 1880 in J F S Gordon’s The Book of the Chronicles of Keith: ‘Choking the lums with a divot which occasionally stramashed the Tea Pots’.
It is first recorded in Yorkshire as a verb meaning smash to pieces, as in the example above. Therefore, the New English Dictionary hypothesises it may be an altered intensive form of smash and argues against the Scottish lexicographer John Jamieson’s ingenious suggestion of connection with Italian strammazone, a downward slash with a rapier in fencing. Dictionaries of the Scots Language adjudicates: ‘There is nothing inherently impossible in the adoption of a fencing term ... but the phonology, especially the accentuation, is difficult to explain and earlier historical evidence for development of meaning is lacking. The word may in fact be a corruption of Old French escarmoche or one of its many forms ... which have produced English scrimmage, skirmish.’ Etymology is certainly not an exact science.