DANISH AND SCOTS... MUTUALLY COMPREHENSIBLE DEPENDING ON YOUR GENERATION

We were walking through Whinfell forest in Cumbria on Saturday when a cute little bunny jumped out from behind a bush (Thomas assures me it was cute - I am fairly indifferent to bunnies in general, except perhaps in stew, he seems to think they make better pets than stews...) Anyway Thomas pointed at it and said to Léon: Kan du klappe kaninen? Without a second thought I immediately understood Léon was to pat the rabbit. My old Gramps would probably have said something like:Gie the wee rabbit a clap, hen when I was three... but kids don't hear as much Scots these days, not in boring old Newton Mearns anyway. So Léon looked extremely dubiously at Thomas, then me, as if asking my opinion. I smiled, so he took that to mean it was ok... slowly he brought his little hands together and applauded a very surprised little rabbit, looking equally puzzled about the things us adults suggest sometimes!

OLD SCOTS

I've been toying with the idea for months that I should probably blog a Scottish word or two every few weeks just so my kids come to recognize them in years to come as many died out in active use in my grandparents' generation meaning I can understand them but my children will never hear them. Tonight when I blogged Cliff, I suddenly realized I couldn't bear to look a that hideous photo every time I logged on to my blog, so would have to post something, anything in fact, just so I didn't see it as the last posting! So maybe tonight would be a good night for a random Scottish word...hmmmm let me think...how about 'syne'. When I was little, sorry wee, after dinner on a Saturday night, we always had dinner with my grandparents, Matt and Jean, on Saturdays, Granny used to disappear into the tiny kitchenette, announcing she was 'away to syne the dishes'. I was puzzled. I understood that she was going to sign the plates and cups. Why on earth would anyone want to autograph the crockery? As usual, instead of asking I spent manys a long hour wondering what 'to syne' meant - I guess I was always destined for lexicography! Anyway for all you non-Scots out there - to syne means to wash or to rinse something, so now you know!

FEELING OLD - A PHYL'S BLOG LEITMOTIF?

So I was driving into town with all 3 kids in the back of the car tonight. They asked me to put on the cd of High School Musical. 'Is that your favourite record at the moment guys?' I asked. Blank stares. 'Record?' 'Surely you have seen a record - you know like a big black cd?' I asked. 'No never', they both replied. Oh my God, how old am I? It is funny to think both my grandmothers died before ever hearing the word cd and yet my kids don't know records. My Granny even worked in a record shop when she wasn't playing piano in a night club! Anyway they eventually remembered they had once seen a record on an episode of Tom and Jerry. When were they made? 1950s?

Oh and Tom and Jerry itself is an odd one. Everyone in the world knows they are both boys but my kids insist and have done all their lives that Jerry is a girl. I thought that they were confusing with the name Geri, but no it is more cryptic than that! Being French bilingual they know it is un chat but une souris but the non-French part of their brains uses this information to assign gender, something a real monolingual French person would never do. How cool is that?

HAUD YER WHEESHT!

I was in a shop at the weekend that sold T-shirts with typically Scottish phrases printed on them. My kids' reaction to the T-shirts got me to thinking, with some nostalgia and some sadness, about quite how quickly language and meaning is lost. The first T-shirt said 'Haud yer wheesht' - instantly recognizable to me as Gramps used to say it to me often when I was a child in the 70s, so it was language I knew but didn't use. My parents, however, don't often use these old Scottish terms, and I, belonging to a generation on, never use them although am passively au fait with them all. They feel alien on my tongue but not in my head :-( The upshot of course being that my kids - born just 30 years after me in the same town, but, significantly, after the death of all of my grandparents didn't have any notion of what it meant - It was as foreign to them as it would be to any Englishman or foreign tourist :-( I tried a few more - for instance asking them if they knew what a 'clype' was, but no - blank stares - I must bring a Scot's Gem home from work and teach them these little gems before it is too late.