Scots language

No.

And language is a problem because no one in Europe spoke English, apart from the English and the Scots.

England is such an unimportant place.

Why would you bother? You'd learn German, you'd learn French, you might learn Polish, but not English.

these advantages i paid but two guineas six guineas is the steerage fare eight that by the

second cabin and when you remember that the steerage passenger must supply bedding and dishes and in five cases out of ten either brings some dainties with him or privately pays the steward for extra rations the difference in price becomes almost nominal air comparatively fit to breathe food comparatively varied and the satisfaction of being still privately a gentleman may thus be had almost for the asking two of my fellow-passengers in the second cabin had already made the passage by the cheaper fare and declared it was an experiment not to be repeated as i go on to tell about my steerage friends the reader will perceive that they were not alone in their opinion out of ten with whom i was more or less intimate i am sure not fewer than five vowed if they returned to travel second cabin and all who had left their wives behind them assured me they would go without the comfort of their presence until they could afford to bring them by saloon our party in the second cabin was not perhaps the most interesting on board perhaps even in the saloon there was as much good-will and character yet it had some elements of curiosity there was a mixed group of swedes danes and norsemen one of whom generally known by the name of johnny in spite of his own protests greatly diverted us by his clever cross-country efforts to speak english and became on the strength of that an universal favourite it takes so little in this world of shipboard to create a popularity there was besides a scots mason known from his favourite dish as irish stew three or four nondescript scots a fine young irishman o'reilly and a pair of young men who deserve a special word of condemnation one of them was scots the other claimed to be american admitted after some fencing that he was born in england and ultimately proved to be an irishman

born and nurtured but ashamed to own his country he had a sister on board whom he faithfully neglected throughout the voyage though she was not only sick but much his senior and had nursed and cared for him in childhood in appearance he was like an imbecile henry the third of france the scotsman though perhaps as big an ass was not so dead of heart and i have only bracketed them together because they were fast friends and disgraced themselves equally by their conduct at the table next to turn to topics more agreeable we had a newly-married couple devoted to each other with a pleasant story of how they had first seen each other years ago at a preparatory school and that very afternoon he had carried her books home for her i do not know if this story will be plain to southern readers but to me it recalls many a school-idle with wrathful swayings of eight and nine confronting each other's stride-legs flushed with jealousy for to carry home a young lady's books was both a delicate attention and a privilege then there was an old lady

or indeed i am not sure that she was as much old as antiquated and strangely out of place who had left her husband and was travelling all the way to kansas by herself we had to take

her own word that she was married for it was sorely contradicted by the testimony of her appearance nature seemed to have sanctified her for the single state even the colour of her

endeavor was bent upon keeping her watch true to glasgow time till she should reach new york they had heard reports her husband and she of some unwarrantable disparity of hours between these two cities and with a spirit commendably scientific had seized on this occasion to put them to the proof it was a good thing for the old lady for she passed much leisure time in studying the watch once when prostrated by sickness she let

it run down it was inscribed on her harmless mind in letters of adamant that the hands of a watch must never be turned backwards and so it behoved her to lie in wait for the exact moment

ere she started it again when she imagined this was about due she sought out one of the young second-cabin scotsmen who was embarked on the same experiment as herself and had hitherto been less neglectful she was in quest of two o'clock and when she learned it was already seven on the shores of clyde she lifted up her voice and cried gravy i had not heard this innocent expletive since i was a young child and i suppose it must have been the same with the other scotsmen present for we all laughed our fill last but not least i come to my excellent friend mr jones it would be difficult to say whether i was his right-hand man or he mine during the voyage thus at table i carved while he only scooped gravy but at our concerts at which more anon he was the president who called up performers to sing and i but his messenger who ran his errands and pleaded privately with the over-modest i knew i liked mr jones from the moment i saw him i thought him by his face to be scottish nor could his accent undeceive me for as there is a lingua franca of many tongues on the moles and in the feluccas of the mediterranean so there is a free or common accent among english-speaking men who follow the sea

And then English is...

German, French, English, Latin, Greek, Scots.

English is just essentially the...

I was going to say the desalination.

So what? The other...

Because the other classic one was the, I mean, this is slightly angular, but you talk about it, and I remember the news stories about it when it was revealed that the Scots Wikipedia, Scots being, you know, the language spoken in Scotland that's related to English or a branch of the Germanic languages, was entirely written by, I believe, a teenager who didn't speak Scots and sort of just wrote articles that sort of sounded like it.

This stuff is really Wikipedia at its worst.

So one of the reasons I'm a kind of moderate inclusionist is I think that probably most small language Wikipedia shouldn't exist.

And Scots Wikipedia is an example of why.

So Scots is the language that Robbie Burns wrote his poems in.

It's not Scottish Gaelic.

Some people say it's an I dialect of English.

So it's called The Library Book.

by Susan Orlean and it's a non-fiction book about the LA Public Library and I will when I talk about the book I will tell you about the Australian accent that comes in but can you see this little tiny little symbol it's quite a simple nice cover a nice blue with golden like font and stuff with a tiny little symbol in the middle what is that flame it is a flame because it well the book you're not going to like this because it is a book about the LA Public fire oh that burned for seven hours and i think hundreds of thousands of books were burned i didn't know so unfortunately what happened was well unfortunately the fire happened but also i think the next day chernobyl the nuclear reactor kind of blew up so that took precedence fair enough to this library uh fire so it was just like timing a lot of people don't know about it but this book tells it all yeah so that's the Aussie accent coming in LA and my second one is called Glasgow Boys by Margaret MacDonald and very much Glasgow accent Scots is peppered throughout because one of the characters is like from Glasgow and so grew up speaking Scots and things and I had not a bother reading it I was like I might as well have been born and brought up in Glasgow and this is my uh book one of my project for the autumn winter which is award-winning books so this is a young adult book and it won the carnegie medal for writing in 2025 and it also won the uk la uh teachers award so that's the uk literacy um award where teachers like vote on books that they really like and they're excited to talk to their students about And I loved it.

It's not at all my kind of book that I would I was curious about it.

I'd read about it a little bit.

Not necessarily the family that you're born in.

So, yeah, just totally love this book.

And you said some of it was in Scots.

It

We have it here in the UK as well.

There are people who remember going through the experience of, for example, being hit at school with Scots.

For sure, I've spoken to people who've had that experience.

I wouldn't be surprised if I heard about Welsh speakers, Irish speakers experiencing the same thing.

And, you know, we, we've had conversations about what it means to reclaim a word, what it means to reclaim something, but I'm kind of a nerd, so I also like to think about this.

I like to think about the fact that the origins of the word queer come from like, I think, 15th or 16th century Scots, when it used to m- mean things like odd, strange, oblique, unique.

You know, ultimately weird, right? And so for me, when I look at it that way, I think, "Okay, so the majority of the life of this word actually meant something else."

Mm.

I love that.

Mm.

Well, you know, I'm kind of embarrassed to even say this, Cassidy, but I had, it had just not really hit me that queer, you know, 'cause that's how the Scots would pronounce it, that queer was a Scots word.

Um, you know, and of course I-