Word of the week

• threap v. argue, contend, be disputatious; quarrel; assert
• abune, aboon, abuin, etc. adv. and prep. above, over; etc.
• abune, aboon, abuin, etc. adv. and prep. above, over; etc
• abune, aboon, abuin, etc. adv. and prep. above, over; etc.
• wee adj. small, tiny, little, restricted in size
• cranreuch n. hoar-frost
• first foot v. to be the first person to enter a house on New Year’s morning

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abune, aboon, abuin, etc. adv. and prep. above, over; etc.

“abune, aboon, abuin, etc. adv. and prep. above, over; etc.”

21st January 2008

If you have ever attended a Burns' Supper, you will no doubt have heard the word abune in the Bard's famous Address to a Haggis: "Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face, Great chieftain o' the puddin-race! Aboon them a' ye tak your place, Painch, tripe, or thairm". Depending on your view of the relative merits of consuming various parts of an animal’s insides, you may consider this an eighteenth century example of damning with faint praise.

Abune is recorded from the late fourteenth century and represents a shortened form of the obsolete Scots word abovin, with the same sense, derived from Old English abufan, the ancestor of English above. Abune appears in various phrases, including "abune the blankets", in good health, used by J. D. Carrick in The Laird of Logan (1835): "You're a' abune the blankets, I hope, meat hale, and workingsome". Something "abune your fit" is beyond your capacity, as illustrated in James Logie Robertson's poem, Hughie's Winter Excuse for a Dram (1886): "The pooers o’ Nature, wind an' snaw, Are far abune oor fit".

At the present time, abune may be found in Scots literature in a variety of different spellings, including abuin, in Bruce Leeming’s Scots Haiku II (2000): "Throu the Grampians a jet skreichs: faur abuin an earn fidderin" (Through the Grampians a jet screams: far above an eagle hovering). In the north-east, abeen is sometimes used to represent local pronunciation. In her 2001 poem Toon Junction, Aberdeenshire poet Sheena Blackhall describes "A stooshie o spurgies Chitterin abeen the lums" (a commotion of sparrows twittering above the chimneys).

Many writers consider the preservation of local voices to be at least as important as the quest for a national voice. There are many arguments about how to write in Scots, yet language is always changing, and it remains to be seen whether a standard Scots is abune oor fit.