- full. This is the usual Scots word for ‘full’ in any context, but it does often mean ‘full of drink’. It is possible to be bitch, blin, greetin [weeping], roarin, spuin [vomiting], stottin [bouncing] or tumblin fou, and taken to extremes one might become fou as a buckie [winkle], fou as a whulk, fou as a piper, fou as a puggie [monkey], fou as the Baltic, fou as the ee o’ a pick [the ee is the eye-shaped hole in the head of the pick into which the handle is inserted] or fou as a fiddler’s bitch. Or if you are wise, you can stop when you are just fouish.
These states can bring about such alarmingly foolish acts as that described by John Service in Dr Duguid (1887): Being as fou’s a biled wulk [boiled whelk], he put three chairges in the gun, stapping them doon till it was primed to the muzzle, juist like himsel’.
Roarin fou was a regular state for Tam o Shanter. His wife complains: ev’ry naig was ca’d a shoe on, The smith and thee gat roaring fou on.