- sharp; keen; greedy, covetous. Robert Tannahill in a poem of 1807 derides worldliness: Thy Mither’s gair an’ set upon the warl, It’s Muirland’s gear that gars her like the carl. But John Galt takes a very balanced view in Sir Andrew Wylie (1822): He’s a wee gair, I aloo; but the liberal man’s the beggar’s brother and James Nicholson in Idylls o’Hame (1870) expresses a wholly approving attitude: We never wantit, wife, For ye were aye sae gair. Of course, even a virtue can be taken to extremes as William Brockie laments in The Confessional (1876): An’ yet she grudges me my meat. . .What does ane live for but to eat? This gairness is a perfect staw [excess, probably used ironically, as a staw is usually caused by a surfeit of food. See Sta under Gluttony].
And, as is so often the case with ill-gotten gains, there is no long term benefit because, proverbially, Gair-gathered siller Will no haud thegither.