Re: Scotticisms?
- From: grammatim <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 6 Apr 2009 10:11:46 -0700 (PDT)
On Apr 6, 11:16 am, Harlan Messinger
<hmessinger.removet...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Peter T. Daniels wrote:
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!
Agreed!
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?
OED has, for "pinkie", one definition that begins "Chiefly Sc. Small,
tiny. Of the eyes: narrow, winking, half-shut" and then continues with
the derived usage of the little finger, describing it as "orig. Sc.",
with the intermediate step "Sc. Something very small or insignificant.
Now rare exc. in [the little finger sense]."
OED also says that "carry-out is "orig. and chiefly US", though one of
their attestations is from the Evening News in Edinburgh.
For "tenement":
"4. spec. a. In England, A portion of a house, tenanted as a separate
dwelling; a flat; a suite of apartments, or even a single room so let or
occupied.
‘In modern Eng. practice, a tenement is anything that can be
separately held, including therefore a flat, etc.’ (Sir F. Pollock).
" b. In Scotland, more particularly applied to a large house (i.e.
edifice under one roof) constructed or adapted to be let in portions to
a number of tenants, each portion so separately occupied being
considered and called a ‘house’. Called also tenement of houses, land of
houses (= tenement house in 5).
Thus a ‘house’ in England may form one ‘tenement’, or contain a
number of ‘tenements’ (and is then a ‘tenement house’: see 5); in
Scotland, a ‘tenement’ may form one ‘house’, or contain a number of
‘houses’ or dwellings."
That sure looks like a pre-revision entry. Hopefully they'll add the
US usage when they get around to T.
For "indictment":
"1. The action of indicting or accusing, a formal accusation; spec. in
Eng. Law, the legal process in which a formal accusation is preferred to
and presented by a Grand Jury. Hence the phrases 'to bring in' or 'lay
an indictment', and (of the Grand Jury) 'to find an indictment'.
" 2. Scots Law. A form of process by which a criminal is brought to
trial at the instance of the Lord Advocate; the formal written charge."-
We do it differently from both of them: an indictment is brought by
"the people." But the prosecutor (in NY, the D.A.) apparently can
bring charges either with or without a grand jury -- is the former not
an indictment?
.
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- From: Peter T. Daniels
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- From: Harlan Messinger
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