Episode 12 Blethering Scots

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# Booking tactics

# Getting out the fact sheets

# Love them statistics

# Blink...and you'll miss it. #

As a broadcaster and football pundit,

Stuart Cosgrove has a very wide-ranging Scots vocabulary.

Working on the radio show Off The Ball, I think, in lots of ways

allows the Scots language to be spoken publicly in the mass media.

And of course, Scottish football itself is actually populated

over the years with Scots language.

So a really, really poor centre-half is a tumshie. A turnip.

Of course, many Scottish teams take their nicknames from Scots language.

An obvious one would be Arbroath,

the Red Lichties from the red light off the coast of Arbroath.

And the Doonhamers, Queen of the South,

the Bully Wee. There's all sorts of different club nicknames,

but by far and away my favourites is actually Wick Academy

in the north-east of Scotland.

And Wick Academy's nickname is the Scorries.

And Scorries, as I understand it, in the north-east of Scotland,

is the word that they would use linguistically for a seagull.

Scorries. It's just a great word.

It almost has that sense of gutturalness about it

that all great Scots words should have.

My granny used to have this phrase, "Monie a mickle maks a muckle."

Now, that's a real classic, that one. It's about saving up, isn't it?

"Monie a mickle maks a muckle, son."

If you keep wee bits of money and you keep them all together,

it'll grow into big money and you'll become rich.

The bankers should be telt, monie a mickle maks a muckle.

In the 1950s when Stuart was at school,

talking Scots wasnae the done thing.

As a kid growing up, I was aware that

I actually spoke two languages,

one in the playground and one in the classroom.

Scots language had actually been something

that had almost been criminalised within the culture.

It was something that you could speak to your friends about or in,

or maybe an older relative, like a granny or whatever,

and you could do it in the playground,

but as soon as you went into the classroom,

it was almost beaten out of you

and you had to speak what would be RP proper English, as it were.

Thankfully, these days, attitudes towards speaking Scots are very different.

The time is ripe in Scottish society now for us to reclaim,

rediscover and fall back in love again with our own language.

Now, it's really important,

I think, in a modern global society that you understand English,

because it's one of the great global languages, but if you're a Scot

and you feel Scottish and you want to speak in the Scots language,

it's an amazingly proud language with centuries of history.

The important thing is, rediscover it from the playground,

don't whisper it, be proud of the words, say the words because they're our words

and you've every right to speak your language.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd