- idleness, laziness, reluctance to work. Idleset could be harmless relaxation, as in George Macdonald’s Sir Gibbie (1879): And here am I . . .sittin’ here in idleseat, wi’ my fire, an’ my brose, an’ my bible, but there is a slight sense of guilt at doing nothing.
Robert Louis Stevenson’s old lawyer in Weir of Hermiston (1897) has no patience with it: Ye’ll have to find some kind of a trade, for I’ll never support ye in idleset. The same parental stricture applies in Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Cloud Howe (1933): His father. . .would glunch and glare at every bit mouthful he saw his son eat- his hands had never held idleceit’s bread.
Idleset was not always a matter of choice, though. Unemployment was always a source of suffering and Alex. Murdoch points out the unfairness of circumstances in Scotch Readings (1886): The bailies are no subject to idle-sets, like puir working-men. For those in work, the typical Scottish employer is embodied in Swatches o’ Hamespun (1922): Dubbies wis a driver an’ keepit nae idleseet fowk aboot’s place.