To be ramfeezled is to be, among other things, in a state of extreme confusion as shown in this example from the Scottish National Dictionary's (SND) 2005 Supplement: “This shows he wanted his story read inside AND outside the Ettrick Forest, and I have warstled to help this by putting among my final notes a glossary of words liable to ramfeezle Sassenachs, North Americans and others with their own variety of English.” (Alasdair Gray, A History Maker, 1994).

Ramfeezle also has many other shades of meaning; the following shows how it can mean extreme disorder and turning everything topsy turvey: “When they found naething to reward their thievery, they wreckit and ramfoozled the quheir [choir], they cowpit the high altar, and brunt the tapestried arras.” (J. Service, Dr. Duguid, 1887).

The following observation from a biography of William Cowper appeared in the Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser of 25.02.1893: “He hailed with delight the the first poems of Robert Burns, though a neighbouring farmer to whom he lent the book said that many of the Scottish word “ramfeezled” him.” This example is of particular interest because the editors of SND suggest that the word was itself a coinage of Burns by combining the elements ‘ram-' “used with intensive force before words which generally imply something forcible, vigorous or disorderly”, and an English dialect word ‘feeze' “to beat” so perhaps Cowper's farmer friend already knew the word before Burns and it may have an older history than the SND's editors first thought.

Scots Word of the Week is written by Pauline Cairns Speitel of Scottish Language