A Word of Ulster Scots 5

Ulster-Scots speaker Liam Logan gives us another of his wry looks at the way Ulster Scots talk about quantity and measurement.

I’d like to give some consideration to the vexed and vexing question of measurement in Ulster Scots, not only quantity or distance but also, perhaps, intensity or numeric values.

‘Bit’ would be the generic term (a bit o rain, a bit o meat) for quantity but not an exact measure (“a bit o a barney”). ‘A drap’ or ‘a taste’ can usually be easily interchanged but is generally, but not exclusively, applied to liquid measures (“(“A wee drap o tay” “A drap o learnin’s aisy carriet” “The country’s crying oot for a taste o rain”); admittedly, the last remark is not heard all that frequently.

If you leave to one side expressions like ‘whut wud drap aff the blak o yer nail’, a term of metaphorical quantity (or lack thereof) rather than scientific measurement, I’d guess the smallest (conversationally) measurable amount to be ‘a wee toaty bit’,

(“A jist tak a wee toaty bit o milk in ma tay”) obviously leading to ‘a wee bit’. (“It’s only a wee bit further on”) but this might also be employed as an understatement “Thon boy’s a wee bit wile” to perhaps convey the presence of rather more ‘wile’ than might be acceptable in polite society. 

Then comes ‘a brave wee bit ‘(“He wusnay drunk but he had tane a brave wee bit “) though again, without independent scientific verification, the only real measurement is comparative, this being a lesser amount than ‘a brave bit’. (“I didnay see the hale thing but A seen a brave bit”).

The term ‘big bit’ to my mind carried the meaning - the most of, what little remained was, to the speaker, of little moment. (“It’s nay use comin noo when the big bit o it’s dane”).

Numbers are often communicated in a similarly inexact fashion but there would be some general agreement as to their ranking. ‘A wheen’ would be ‘mare nor yin or two’ bit no as mony as a brave wheen’. Slightly larger again is ‘a gether up’ but on occasion this term was applied to indicate a group whose provenance or antecedents were questionable pedigree, that the quality of the quantity was somewhat below standard (“I went alang but thur wuz only a gether up o thim”).

In the same vein is ‘a clatchin’, a derogatory term for a group or collection of people or things (“There wuz a clatchin o gulpins ootside the pub”).

Then might come ‘a clatter’ meaning a large number (“We wur jist sittin doon when a clatter o her yins landed”).

‘A lock’ would also be a considerable amount of similar (or possibly slightly greater) value than “a clatter’. There would be fairly wide interpretations with variations bearing, to some extent, on the nature of the matter under discussion; “A lock o yins wudnay hay him aboot thim but he hiz din nathin tay me” almost certainly denotes a different numerical value to that indicated by ‘Me and him went oot an got a lock o drink’ but it is nevertheless an expression of some numerical significance; the first quantifies people while the second counts bottles and halfuns.

Carrying no agreed numerical values, ‘a tear’ would outrank ‘a lock’; I think I would regard the greater drunkard as he who had “tane a tear o drink” rather than he who had “tane a lock o drink” although indubitably both could be referred to as having had ‘a feed o drink’ again, a term of significant quantity. Perhaps conveying that the capacity of our two imagined topers

(of whatever magnitude) had been reached, they might be deemed by some to be ‘full’ (“As full as a po”  “As full as forty cats” “As full as the eye o a pick”) sometimes rendered as ‘foo’.

The topics of time and money will require another column (an mair

tim an catter).