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• Messan n. a small pet dog, a lap-dog.
• Hoast n., v. a cough, to cough
• Droukit past participle drenched, soaked.
• Wifie n. a woman.
• SLAP n. a gap in a wall etc.
• HAP v. to cover, to wrap up.

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Unco adjective, adverb, noun strange, unfamiliar; extremely; a marvel.

“Unco adjective, adverb, noun strange, unfamiliar; extremely; a marvel.”

13th October 2008

unco

Unco (earlier uncouth) has an interesting history. It comes from an Old English word, meaning ‘unknown’, a sense well attested in Older Scots. Bellenden (1531), in his translation of Boece’s The Chronicles of Scotland, tells us that “In Annandail is ane loch ... full of uncouth fische”, distant cousins of Nessie, perhaps. As this quotation from Barbour’s Bruce (1375) shows, the unknown is often treated with suspicion: “He saw hyr wncouth...him thocht That for gud cummyn wes scho nocht”, and from there is not hard to see how the sense could drift towards ‘untrustworthy’, ‘socially inept’ or even ‘supernatural’.

Certainly, strangers were not always treated with the hospitality for which the Scots are now famous. The Transactions of the Scottish Ecclesiological Society tell of the 1589 decree ‘That unkowth and strong beggaris be keipit furth of the kirkyaird.” Inhabitants of Elgin, according to the town records for 1622 were “Nocht to receave in ludging owtlandische people nor wncowthe beggeris” and Dumbartonshire went further with the injunction of 1635 quoted by J. Irving in Dumbarton Castle, Dumbartonshire County and Burgh: “All unkuth beggars and uthir puir strangers to be removit out of the burgh”.

Later quotations reflect a loss of the final –th, and we find Tam o Shanter “getting fou and unco happy”. The phrase the ‘unco guid’, popularised by Burns in his witty but pointed Address to the Unco Guid or the Rigidly Righteous, has entered the language as a byword for those who claim the moral high ground.

As a noun, we find it used by J. Service in Dr Duguid (1887) to advertise “The Blair Museum, where a' kinds of uncos from hereaboot and farawa are to be seen”.

This word is an unco in itself and worth exploring further in the Dictionary of the Scots Language (www.dsl.ac.uk).


Scottish Word of the Week is written by Chris Robinson of Scottish Language Dictionaries