This is the Scots’ secret weapon against sloth. Our language has had its up and downs over the centuries, as have some of the words that it contains. Smeddum is one such word. It goes back to Anglo-Saxon smeodoma, meaning fine flour. In seventeenth-century Scotland, it referred to the finest particles of grain lost as dust in the grinding process and swept up as refuse or food for the miller’s pigs. A century later, its meaning had been extended to any fine powder including a red precipitate of mercury, an insecticide known to Burns, who would have given the eponymous antihero of his poem To a Louse a dose of fell [powerful] red smeddum.
The notion of efficacy extended the meaning of the word to pith, strength or essence of a substance and so, in 1822, Galt describes good snuff as sae brisk in the smeddum, so pleasant to the smell.
Smeddum was applied figuratively to spirit, energy and courage. Burns wrote in 1787 of persons possessing smeddum and rumblegumption. This is the sense in which Lewis Grassic Gibbon used it for the title of a short story.
Most revealingly, we find in the poems of James Mylne (1790) that Afore he wrote, bauld Ramsay saw the smeddom o’ our tongue decay.
Mylne, and Allan Ramsay, might have been surprised by the renewed smeddum in the Scots language today. As for the word itself, not only has smeddum ceased to be the sweepings of the mill floor but it is now one of the most valued qualities of the Scots character – grim and gritty energy and perseverance.