New Statesman Scotland - Where words fall short
There is a Scots word to "sorn", meaning to scrounge. It is an idea more than matched by a word from the Pacific Islands which means to arrive at someone's house and to live from their hospitality until your hosts have nothing left. I came across the word in question (now lost to me) in a Book of Untranslatables, which I found in New York and presented to Alastair Reid who, as a translator himself, collects such currencies.
Scots is a rich and revelatory seam for anyone who wishes to explore the deeper and more persistent resonances within Scottish culture. Chambers Scots Thesaurus is an endlessly fascinating source. If, for example, you turn to the section headed "Character Types", you will find two and a half columns of "Miscellaneous Positive" types, but a full seven and a half of "Negative" types. Only "Weakness of Character" gets more column inches. Unsurprisingly, "Sources of Contentment" is hugely outweighed by "Sources of Discontent". And if you sift through this litany of brosie-heidit gawks, gomerils, lingam-tringam neip-heided snauchles - all to some degree untranslatable - you will find in our culture little tolerance for fools or ne'er-do-wells, or for those who are slovenly, clumsy or cack-handed.
A community emerges from these predilections and attitudes that is pre-industrial and hard-pressed; a rural community in which anyone who is not actively contributing towards it is a drain upon it; a community that requires vigilance in all behaviours, including the cast of the mind, to keep the weeds of sloth and carelessness from clogging it up. It is a community that values action, not words, and saves some of its most expressive namings for empty vessels and the noise they make; the bletherskites and their haivers.
Speaking of sayings and cultural expression, I have been wondering about the derivation of the masthead under which Tom Morton and I operate. Our editor tells me it was taken from a question his mother heard when she worked in the Co-op in Kelso. When the women from Yettholm and the Ettrick valleys reported to work, the cosmopolitan grand-dames of Kelsae toun would inquire of them: "Well, what's fresh in from far out?"
The cultural superiority of large centres over smaller ones is a matter of infinite regression. When I taught in the village of Cargenbridge a few miles outside Dumfries, I noted the extent to which the pupils' proximity to the thriving metropolis was enough, in their eyes, to give them clout over the hicks bussed in from Mainsriddle, Shawhead and Sandyhills.
I haven't been able to tie down the geographical origin of "What's fresh?" at all. There is, though, a pleasing openness to it as a question, allowing the personal response elicited by "How's it gaun?" "Fit like?" or "Ca va?", while also welcoming broader social concerns - of the family or, again, of the community.
Global technology now ensures that we can all be connected to more fresh fare from around the world than we can possibly cope with, yet there is still an excitement for some in being where they imagine the action to be. It is, though, an excitement that leaves many cold; for them, Westminster and Holyrood are places of hot air, full of suspicious bletherskites. On the fringes (in others' views, not theirs) is where they want to be.
And if you live in such a community, only tragedy can pull you into centre stage; as happened to the Isle of Whithorn the other week. The Isle is one of my favourite places: it is where my wife and I holidayed immediately after determining to marry, and it is where I chose for our first family holiday after an absence abroad.
It has an island calm to it and, on a summer evening, with the boats lying in the natural harbour like big dogs, there is a picturesque charm to it that obviously belies the deadliness of the local trade. As the full horror of the loss of the Solway Harvester was revealed - a web of heartache over the whole community - it became clear, as it had done in Lockerbie a decade before, that words, no matter how expressive, well-meaning or apt, can never be apt enough: only in silence, in the pell-mell of our thoughts, can we begin to approach untranslatable tragedy. As I wrote in "Rough Seas", a poem about a similar shipping tragedy many years ago,
for some people Rough Seas can never be
metaphorical: nor words enshrine their pain.
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