© Chris Robinson 2008
Uncovering the Scottish Character
O wad some pooer the giftie gie us
Tae see oorsels as ithers see us.
(Robert Burns)
When someone says ‘Scotsman’ or ‘Scotswoman’ to you, what kind of person immediately springs to mind? Is it the tartan-clad highlander saying ‘Hoots mon, och aye the noo?’ Or is it the character of Rab C. Nesbitt? Or is it the neat, friendly, shortbread-baking grannie? Are the Scots really mean? Or is Scottish hospitality second to none? Are we a race of drunks or a race of puritans?
Many nationalities have been subjected to stereotyping and the Scots are no exception. What this book aims to do is explode some of the myths and to peer into the private lives of the Scots, examining the deepest recesses of their psyches. I can’t promise to see oorsels as ithers see us, but the words we use to describe ourselves are very revealing.
However, trying to see ourselves through the words we use comes with a built-in difficulty; there are far more words in Scots for criticising than for praising! If we gie someone their character, it will be an honest appraisal, and we are not given to flattery. William Dunbar has used more disparaging words than most in his virtuoso poetry, most famously in The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy – a contest in insults between two very skilful poets. However, it is another of Dunbar’s poems that I will take as a starting point for this book, The Dance of the Sevin Deidly Synnis. What are the sins that Scots have been guilty of, and what are our redeeming virtues?
Many of the words we know and use today in Scots can be traced back through the centuries and, if they are as current now as they were in the long distant past, has the Scottish character really changed all that much? Let’s see if we can really uncover something of the true Scottish character and find out Wha’s Like Us.
I may be an old sinner but I am proud to be a Scot and a speaker of Scots. I get angry at people who undervalue this ancient and expressive language and I envy those Scots who also speak Gaelic. I cannot re-read the quotation about a tasting of herrings with aquavite as a digestif (see Aquavite) without an attack of mouth-watering gluttony. I was brought up to be grippie, in the best sense of the word, and if that make me guilty of avarice, so be it, but, with the end of the book in sight, sloth prevents me from enumerating my other few failings and modesty forbids any mention of my many virtues.
We certainly have colourful and pithy words which allow us to criticise and sometimes laugh at ourselves. The quotations in this book may seem like a catalogue of excess of pleasure, foibles and weaknesses, folly and downright crimes, but they are the stuff that literature and newspaper reports are made of. As Mark Antony said of Caesar, The good is oft interred with the bones and flattering quotations are harder to find. Nevertheless, we Scots are much like anybody else, no better, no worse. As the old Scots saying would have it: We are all Jock Tamson’s bairns or, as Robert Burns wrote:
For a’ that, an’ a’ that,
It’s coming yet for a’ that,
That Man to Man, the world o’er,
Shall brothers be for a’ that.