Cheers

Dave, my hair guy, has a pretty stable Edinburgh accent, having lived here all his life. I have had 3 haircuts with him. The first, in April, I could barely understand him. The second, in June, I understood about 50%. And then last week I had my last Scotland haircut, and I could pick up about 95% of his sentences.

I guess this is progress. But then again ... I walk down Charlotte Square on my way to PureGym every morning, and there are there construction workers. Most are Glaswegian - you can tell by the way they trill their R's as hard as Spanish speakers.

I nae can understand them, mate. The Edinburgh accent is the Minor League of Scottish accents. The Glasgow accent is The Show. Or more linguistically, The Shoo.

But It's The Same Language!

Which begs the question. An American and a Scot speak the same language, English. Same basic set of words, same word spellings, same punctuation.

How can they not understand each other????

Lemme be clear. The misunderstandings between the Scots and the American is a two way street. It is not like they are butchering their language while I speak in perfect, fluent sentences. Oh no. This is the feckin' Tower of Babel here. It's feckin' pandemonium.

And before I continue, lemme plug that beautiful, masterful Scottish word: feck, most commonly used in words like feckin'. What a great word! It means exactly the same as its four-letter American counterpart (which I shall not spell out here, out of politeness). But it just sounds better.

"Feck" carries the full weight of profanity to the Scots, but to me, it's a declawed feral cat. "Feck" sounds like "geez", a blatant attempt to evade the 3rd Commandment. Kinda like "darn" or "golly" or my all-time favorite, "Cheese and Rice!"

But back to the matter at hand. English. What a dumpster fire.

And by the way, the Scottish do not know what a dumpster fire is. Do their dumpsters catch on fire? Occasionally, yes, since half the population still smokes cigarettes. But it's not a dumpster in Scotland. It's a skip. So it's a skip fire, which no one in Scotland says. They do, however, say skipping which is the equivalent of dumpster diving.

The Inuits have 40 words for snow, but like the Scots, they have no phrase that conveys the true horror and spectacle of a dumpster fire. Yet that's precisely what English is. It started small, then licked the sides of the lid, and now it's absolutely out of control. All us speakers and writers can do is watch in horror, as people toss on words and phrases, distort meanings, mangle pronunciations. English is the product of people, not committees or governments. And these people ain't pulling the file alarm.

It Gives a Lovely Light

Maybe we should look at this academically. So here's crash course on linguistics.

English is not a distinct language, it's a class of languages. English variants can differ in:

• Spellings, as in colour
• Actual words, such as skip
• Idioms like feckin' mental
• Pronunciation of a particular word like "oot" as oat.
• Inflection. For example, Scottish tends to accent the first syllable, similar to the French.

Pronunciation and inflection pair up to form an accent. In Scotland, the most identifiable accents are from Edinburgh, Glasgow, the Highlands and the Hebrides. Among these, the Edinburgh accent is deemed the "most desirable," and it most closely mirrors the UK "Queen's English" accent. I'm not sure "desirable" is the right word for it - "least unrecognizable" is closer to what they actually mean, in that people have to aurally "squint" less to understand the Edinburgh accent. It's the UK version of the Midwestern accent.

Sir Walter Scott is feckin' brilliant. He writes in accents, and when you read his novels, you experience all the wonderful variations of Scottish accent. In The Antiquary, there's the Queen's English of Lovel, which signifies rank and status:

Sister Grizel responds in her Highland dialect:

OK, it's an acquired taste. But this passage contains all that marvellous variation:

• Spellings, as in auld for old. (cf. Auld Lang Syne)
• Words, as in kens for knows. I hear ken more in Glasgow, but the novel Trainspotting, written in a Edinburgh accent, also uses it. I think it's falling out of favor.
• Idioms like weel minded for well-known.
• Prononciation, again in weel for well. The Scottish accent is most prominent in vowels. There is some overlap with English accents, especially in the "a".

There's a kind of musicality to these Scots dialects, similar to those in Brazilian Portuguese (the language of Bossa Nova). Although people in Edinburgh don't speak like Sister Grizel, reading Sir Walter Scott evokes the feelings you get listening to them speak.

It's hard to describe. Amy and I saw the group Braebach at the Edinburgh International Festival. One of their songs was about a soldier who visited the Highlands, left and spent his entire life wanting to go back. He had caught a little homesickness virus that never left.

Reading Scott makes me feel that way. I can hear those little snippets of English that differ from mine, and they feel like home. Maybe not mine, but someone else's for sure.

Scot Idioms' Greatest Hits

I have a tendency to pick up accents that I like. This is not good. I have to catch myself because it sounds like mocking when I'm really just invoking the sincerest form of flattery. I've had to bite my tongue a few times here in Scotland, and remember to speak American. But I can collect idioms and repeat them mercilessly. And I will do so!

American English is nothing to be ashamed of. Americans have contributed some pretty great stuff to it. None is better than the word "y'all". "Y'all" not only rolls off the tongue, it fills a gap that the Queen's English meaning "you and whoever else is relevant to the subject at hand, including nobody."

Well, if "y'all" is America's greatest contribution to English, "cheers" is surely the Scots'. It is the one word that I will take back to America and use daily.

At first I thought "cheers" meant "thank you," but that's just one of its many uses. It can also mean "I got this," or "That's fine," or "Sorry." Technically, "cheers" means, "Our interaction has now come to an end and I won't think you're a wee prick if you walk away." It's like saying "Out" on a walkie-talkie.

Here are some other favorites of mine. Note that some of them are shared with UK English, which is not surprising since there's a lot of fluidity between the two countries.

1. Ehmmm - You probably think that "ummm" is language-independent, like the sound of a cough or sneeze. Not true. When there's a conversational pause, the Scots fill the sound vacuum with "ehmmm". It's not a generic vowel shift - the "u" does not come out like a short "e" in all words. It's just this word. It feels a little more posh, a little more assured them "ummm", which sounds too much like "dumb."
2. Brilliant - Americans generally use this word only as "smart", but Scots assign it to anything they approve of. You say, "I'll get a Tennants, because I can't get that beer in the states." The response: "Brilliant!" (Except Tennants is pish, but that's another story.). The Australians and some really hip Americans say "noice!" - same thing.
3. Sorted - "We'll get it sorted" is a much more efficient way of saying, "We'll get is straightened out." Interestingly, while America the TSA mantra is "See something, say something," in the UK it is "See it, say it, sorted." If I hear that one more time on a train, I will go mental.
4. Mental - The proper way of saying "crazy", which of course has nothing to do with brain chemistry. The proper Scots pronunciation is "men-al". You should drop as many inner "t's" as possible, as in "Sco-ish."
5. Wee - I once believed the Scottish do not say "wee." Surely it's Americans or Brits making fun of Scottish. Oh no. They say "wee" all the time. And not just in the context of baby-dom. Of course the best application is a "wee dram" but everything that is tiny in whatever relevant dimension is "wee".
6. Rubbish - And finally, a word to mean "bad". "Sorry the weather has been such rubbish," the Scot tells me. I imagine garbage raining from the sky. Rubbish is everything undesirable.

Of course nothing is rubbish in Scotland, including the language. The language just makes it special. Like many things in Scotland, the Scots are very protective of it. They almost go out of their way not to sound like the Brits, although that's less true in Edinburgh.

I am leaving Scotland next week. One thing I will really miss is the cornucopia of languages I hear during a leisurely walk. Not just Scottish English, but Italian and Arabic and Hindi and French and German. One of the most delightful things on Earth is watching someone open their mouth and have no feckin' clue about what will come out.