Alan Riach: Unmitigated sinfulness and subversive infiltration

Alongside that, consider his magnum opus Warriors of the Word: The World of the Scottish Highlanders (Birlinn, 2009), his edited collection of the selected essays of John MacInnes, Duthchas Nan Gaidheal (Birlinn, 2006); the extraordinary Bho Chluaidh gu Calasraid / From the Clyde to Callander: Gaelic Songs, Poetry, Tales and Traditions of the Lennox and Menteith in Gaelic with English translations (The Grimsay Press, 2010); and, co-edited with Wilson McLeod, An Ubhal as Airde / The Highest Apple: An Anthology of Scottish Gaelic Literature.

I once modestly described the latter in The National as the most important book of the century (www.thenational.scot/news/18205167.important-book-century-highest-apple) and I’ll stick with that judgement. These are all essential in any thinking Scottish person’s library, but the two I want to look at today are less weighty.

First, The Naughty Little Book of Gaelic: All the Scottish Gaelic You Need to Curse, Swear, Drink, Smoke and Fool Around, with illustrations by Arden Powell (Sydney, Nova Scotia: Cape Breton University Press, 2014). The best way to give you a sense of what’s going on here is simply to quote from the five chapters: “Cursing”, “Swearing”, “Snuff and Tobacco”, “Drinking” and “Sex”, hopefully exercising appropriately balanced gusto and discretion. As we noted last week, there have been many prurient pontiffs deliberating over “sinful” behaviour and trying to suppress the natural tendency human beings have to self-extension (pardon the pun).

Many puritanical priests, ministers, and self-identifying literary critics found any references to or descriptions of such inclinations and predilections as those named in the contents list offensive and tried to ban them as completely as political and cultural dictators have tried to ban Gaelic culture and language. May such people roast in shame till the day of their repentance.

Studying the matter, some curious facts emerge. Newton tells us: “Unlike the fixation on sexual activity in English, Gaelic curses and insults are oriented around death, suffering and damnation.”

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Now I’d call that a sensible preference. Example: “Buinneach o’n teine ort!” In the belief that diarrhoea was made much worse if it made contact with fire, this means “May you suffer diarrhoea from the fire!” This might not have fatal consequence – but it may. And perhaps the fire was not so much literally burning in the hearth as intrinsic to the … I’ll stop there.

Swearing is often euphemistic, avoiding biblical profanities, one of which is particularly delightful to me: “A mhic an Rhiabhaich!” (This exclamation refers to an offensive person, “Son of the Brindled One!” – the brindled one being the Devil, whose characteristic colours are black and red. The word is my name). Passing over the odes to the snuff box and tobacco (which show how widespread and popular these forms of self-immolation once were), we come to “Drinking”.

Gaelic tradition doesn’t encourage drunkenness and endorses good health and moderation, but appetite and aptitude differ from person to person. Social context is the governing idea. Companionable drinking is always good practice. But even when alone, according with custom, self-medication can be helpful. Newton advises that those who could afford it might take “The Four Drams of the Morning”:

“sgailc-nid” or nest-dram, taken while still in bed; “friochd-uilinn” or a nip of the elbow, to ease the joints while getting up; “deoch cas rùisgte”, the barefoot drink, once you’re on your feet but before getting dressed, and “deoch bhleith”, the one you take before you have your porridge.

It remains a question whether having whisky in the porridge as well would allow you to remain steady on your feet for the rest of the day, or even the morning, or even up to 11am. This conclusively proves that a measured approach combined with a sense of intuitive goodness is always required and recognised as such.

From my own experience, the only time I enjoyed whisky and honey in my porridge for breakfast, I did indeed feel warm and happy all the rest of the day. I can’t remember anything else about that day but I’m sure it was all very pleasant.

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There is most famously the “deoch an dorais”, the drink you are given before you leave the gathering, often deformed into the idea of “one for the road” and rightly stigmatised as a recipe for drunk driving, and therefore extremely bad practice.

But the “drink for the door” might otherwise be a dram of reconciliation, a shared punctuation mark concluding a conversation that could have ranged through various forms of explicit verbal conflict (including insult), and with that in mind, good practice.

Temptations leading to drunkenness, incapability, “finger-lock” while playing the bagpipes (actual or metaphorical), all have their Gaelic remonstrations and there are curses on incapacity, the debilitations of intoxication, the vexations and miseries of alcoholism. In other words, if you go into the cultural context, the priorities are of social balance, co-ordination and mutual good feeling, rather than self-indulgence, hostility and unpleasantness, both personal and communal.

After last week’s essay on The Light Blue Book and Gaelic verse about sexual activities, I won’t dwell here on the extraordinarily extensive Gaelic terminology for human genitalia other than to note its immense curiosity. But I can’t not mention a couple of proverbial sayings, such as: “cho cinnteach is a tha bod ’s an each” (as sure as a horse has a penis) or “Is iomadh rud a ni dithis dheonach” (Two willing people can do many things). Suffice to say this is a small book of rich resource.

And now here’s Gaelic in Your Gob: Four Dozen English Words That Came from the Scottish Highlands, with illustrations by Natalia Lopez and a Foreword by Adhamh O Broin (Saorsa Media / Ingram, 2021). Under eight headings, various “English” words are tracked back as far as possible towards their Gaelic roots, so “Community and Customs” gives us Clan, Slogan and Bard, “Warfare” includes Claymore and Blackmail, “Sport and Music” gives Boobie and Croon, “Food and Domestic Life” includes Whisky, Trousers, Scone and Pet, while “Landscape and Nature” yields Bog, Crag and Ptarmigan, and “Slang and Idioms” has Galore, Gob, Cosy, Snazzy, Brash, Dour, Smidgen and Spunk. And many others.

Under “People and Names”, we start with the word “Scot” itself.

“Scotti” or “Scoti” first appears in Latin in the fourth century AD but seems not to be a Latin word. Written c.312 AD, the Nomina Provinciarum Omnium “lists Roman provinces and the non-Roman enemies of these occupied territories, and includes the Scoti along with the Picti and Caledonii. These latter two tribes were Celtic peoples living in Britain north of the Roman-occupied zone. Ammianus Marcellinus, who died sometime between 390 and 400, wrote a Latin history, noting that the Scots and Picts attacked the frontiers of Roman Britain in the 360s. And Saint Patrick, in the late fourth or early fifth century, writes of Scots as distinct from Irish, acknowledging that not all ethnic Gaels lived in Ireland.

We don’t know where the word itself came from, but some scholars have argued “it likely came from the Gaelic word scot(h): ‘flower; blossom; the finest choice; premier’. The upper classes of Gaelic society are likely to have used it to describe themselves, and they would have used the booty from raids on Roman Britain to elevate their social and economic status within their communities. The Romans seem to have borrowed this self-promotional designation directly from Gaelic and later writers continued to use this term in Latin”.

The Scots, thereby, are blossom people, flower people, primary. Welcoming by nature and fragrant in disposition. Or otherwise, thieves and pirates. Well, it’s as good a myth as any and better than most.

But we should not be too frivolous. The book is built on sound scholarship and has its own serious import. As Newton says in his introduction: “Words are the very lifeblood of culture. Although external tokens – such as flags, clothing, and hair styles – may assert ethnic identities, it is language that gives societies internal cohesion by encoding their knowledge, sharing their ideas, expressing their histories, and transmitting the stories that articulate their unique place in the world. That is why empires typically attack the language of the people they wish to conquer and attempt to replace their language with the language of the empire.”

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The expanding power of anglophone rivals deliberately targeted Gaelic in both Ireland and Scotland, although the earliest etymological dictionary in any vernacular European language was Sanas Cormaic (Cormac’s Glossary) of around the year 900 AD.

By the time of the great poet Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair in the 18th century, cultural reclamation and recovery was increasingly desperately required.

The first Gaelic-to-English dictionary, by the Reverend William Shaw, appeared in 1780, and others followed through the 19th century. But scholars working on the English dictionary were trained in Germanic and Romance languages, not Celtic ones, so the Celtic languages were marginalised in the academic world as well the political one. Against such odds, the persistence of Gaelic is astonishing. Today the Digital Archive of Scottish Gaelic in English and Dachaigh Airson Storas na Gaidhlig in Gaelic is an essential resource. You can find it at dasg.ac.uk/en.

The provenance of the language extends much further than we might assume. In North America, Newton points out: “There are numerous examples of people of African descent who were fluent Gaelic speakers as well as virtuosos of Highland musical tradition. This was largely, although not exclusively, the result of enslavement of Africans by Gaelic speakers.”

A Scottish minister serving a congregation of freed slaves in 1872 said he had met with “a number of [black] people who speak the Gaelic as well as if they had been raised in any of the Hebrides”. If only they had been! And on the other side of the world, the word used for the musical instrument belonging to the Aboriginal Australians, “didgeridoo” may have been coined by Gaelic-speaking settlers in the form of “dudaire dubh” or “dudauche dubh”, meaning “black horn”.

English may maintain itself as the language of power, privilege and prestige, of property and propriety, but Gaelic has a way of infiltrating and subverting its pretentiousness and pomp. This wonderful book is a manual for such undercover operations. Its purpose is creative understanding and the overthrow of linguistic imperialism. In the service of which, there is always more damage to do.