Thursday, November 19, 2009

Scottish Slang

What are they talking about! I've been reading Stuart MacBride's  excellent and gruesome Scottish murder mysteries and encountering lots of colorful Scottish slang.  Frankly, most of it is too colorful to repeat here.  But 'bacon buttie' has been driving me crazy. Apparently Scottish police live on these. So I looked them up and they sound delicious: lots of bacon; bread - can be buttered inside, can be toasted; tomato sauce.  Maybe the Scottish equivalent of a greasy burger.  Yum.  There are more fun words!  Like 'winkle', which as near as I can tell means 'to fish out'.  At one point a character managed to 'winkle' a cigarette from a crushed pack.    And 'manky' is great  - scruffy, dirty, distasteful, disgusting.  'Blootered' means drunk.  Isn't this fun?  For more, read Stuart MacBride.  Then you can play the what? game too.

Stuart MacBride Books

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I,too, am reading his book and
was going a nutcase wondering the nature of a bacon buttie. Sounds like it is best consumed with a paracetamol chaser.