LOUN n lad, male child

Loun has a long, complicated history. Now associated with the North East as a non-pejorative word for a son, or young man, as opposed to a lassie, it appears early in Scotland-wide use as a scoundrel or even a loose woman. East Lothian poet, Dunbar, uses it in his Flyting with Kennedy (a1508) whom he calls a “lathly loun”. Glasgow Burgh Records (1661) order “The thesaurer to pay to Charles McClean, jylour, twentie pundis for his extraordinarie paines in attending the tolbuith...having onlie theifes and louns his prisoners”. This probably implies an additional sense of a person without means, who would be unable to pay his jailor for small comforts. The sense of a female prostitute is clear from the Records of Elgin (1636) “Marjory Peterkine...a pandress as also a loun hirselff”. It could be used of a male fornicator; in the Presbytery Book of Strathbogie (1650) George Robertsone “said he sould cause that lowne the minister haue a fowll face, for he gottin ane bairne in fornication with Elspeth Gordon”. A loun minister was also a term used by Convenanters for a man of the cloth with Episcopalian tendencies. From the beginning, though, it could be used as now to mean, simply, a lad and, in 1922, J. B. Salmond clearly intends the neutral sense of boy or son in Bawbee Bowden (1922): “His father had been blawin’ a’ the week aboot the grand sermon they were to get on the Sabbath frae his loon, Tammas”. In spite of loun’s disreputable past, it is no insult to call someone a loun. It should be noted that it bears no relation to the Latin word for moon, ‘luna’, from which lunatic is derived, but comes from Dutch ‘loen’ meaning a stupid person. From this humble origin, it has come up in the world the last quotation demonstrates.

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

This week's Word is spoken by Michael Hance.