Scotticisms?
- From: "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 6 Apr 2009 07:19:30 -0700 (PDT)
In an article "The Extinction of Scotland in Popular Dictionaries of
English," in *Dictionaries of English* ed. Richard W. Bailey (1987),
A. J. Aitken catalogs and assesses the treatment of some 324
"Scotticism" in five dictionaries -- looking for labels on Scottish
words, noting of definitions for specifically Scottish usages, etc.
Among the words and phrases he looked up are "carry-out" (defined as
'take-away'), "pinkie" ('little finger'), tenement ('block of flats'),
and maybe "indictment" (his explanation isn't clear enough to
dertermine whether it's different from US usage). The first three are
classified as "covert Scotticisms," i.e., ordinary words used in
Scotland without any general awareness that they're not used elsewhere
in the English-speaking world.
However, he's quite wrong about this! All three are normal American
terms (though "tenement" refers both to a particular kind of apartment
building and has negative connotations; it may be more general in
Scotland?) -- yet he's miffed that the Merriam-Webster Third
International doesn't label them as "Scottish" or (his bugaboo)
"chiefly Scottish."
Do linguistically aware Scotspeople generally think these are "their"
words and not used by others?
.
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