Show content as Scots

Words by month

Register with SLC

Subscribe to our news letter and keep up to date.

Make a donation to the SLC

and help preserve this language for future generations

DONATE NOW

Sponsored by

Scottish Arts Council Scottish Arts Council

Supporters of

Learning in Literature

greet v. weep, cry, lament; complain; grumble

Categorised in:
“greet v. weep, cry, lament; complain; grumble”

18th June 2007

Greet is Old English in origin, and makes its début in Scotland in the late fourteenth century, in John Barbour's The Bruce, one of the earliest known pieces of Scots poetry. Here we read: "Men mycht haiff sene ... At leve-takyng the ladyis gret", and later, "He gret for joy, and for pité". The typical examples of the word throughout the Middle Ages reflect this literal sense, though the tears are not always genuine, as in Robert Sempill's Satirical Poems of the Reformation (1589): "Yit in the pulpet we saw him greit, Playand the publict hypocreit".
By the eighteenth century, the literal sense of greetin meaning "shedding tears" had also given rise to senses relating to moaning and complaining. The Records of the University of Glasgow for 1713 explain that during a stooshie, someone "had uttered very reviling language against the principal by calling him a greeting hypocrite". Being described as having a greetin face is not complimentary, as Alex Salmond demonstrated at First Minister's Question time on 7th June: "I welcome the fact that Andy Kerr is looking a bit more cheerful today; he had a pretty greetin face yesterday". This example is particularly interesting because Scots words are more often heard in informal than formal contexts, and it will be interesting to see what effect MSPs may have on this situation.
Scots is probably best described as a linguistic continuum stretching from Broad Scots to Scottish Standard English (with its distinctive grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation), and many of us will find that our speech accords with different points on that continuum depending on who we are addressing and what we hope to convey. But whit aboot writin in Scots? Fine for prose fiction and poetry, it seems, but as Matthew Fitt says in his introduction to But n Ben A-Go-Go, "we receive neither formal training nor official encouragement to write the way we talk".