WEAN n child

The last two weeks have featured words now associated with the North East, although they once had a much wider currency. This week, we look at a word which many people associate with Glasgow. Glasgow authors have used it to great effect, as in this poignant quotation from John and Willy Maley’s From The Calton To Catalonia (1990): “Picture it. The Calton. Fair Fortnight. 1937. Full of Eastern promise. Wimmen windae hingin. Weans greetin for pokey hats (ice-cream cones). Grown men, well intae their hungry thirties, slouchin at coarners, skint as a bairn’s knees.” However, wean, a running together of wee and ane, first appears in the dictionaries with Leadhills-born poet Allan Ramsay’s The Gentle Shepherd (1725): “Troth, my Niece is a right dainty we’an”. This is followed by an Aberdeenshire quotation in Helenore (1768) by Alexander Ross: “The dentyest wean bony Jane fuish (fetched) hame”. Weans, not always dainty, appear in Burns, Scott, Hogg and Stevenson. Weans may mean offspring generally, be they laddie weans or lassie weans, but Anna Blair in The Rowan on the Ridge (1980) is more precise, placing weanhood between infancy and adolescence: “a wean and a baby whose names he had not caught, and the dour halflin’ Bryce, who had looked him up and down and seemed as if he might have checked his teeth or hooves before taking him on to labour”. Even bairnish adults can be called weanly. P. H. Waddell’s 1871 version of Psalm 119 gives “Fu’ clear comes a blink o’ yer words, makin wyss the weanliest chiel” and, in figurative usage, we clearly imagine the flying leather described in James Denniston’s The Battle of Craignilder (1832): “But sword or axe gied weanly whacks Compared wi’ Geordy’s flail, man”. So, although wean is common in West Central Scotland, it is by no means restricted to that area.

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

This week's word is spoken by Dr Dauvit Horsbroch.