Last updated 21:54, Wednesday, 09 July 2008

SEVERAL times I have been asked who is giving the MacDiarmid lecture next month.

I was pleased to reply that Carl MacDougall, a well-known author and broadcaster and champion of the Scottish language, has agreed to come to Langholm to talk about James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd and his circle.

MacDougall has written several novels including The Lights Below and Stone over Water and a non-fiction book called Scots: The Language of the People, which was also a TV series on BBC2 two years ago.

In it he traced the history of the Scots language and its expression in the literary works of the nation.

It includes the poem Wheesht, Wheesht by Hugh MacDiarmid and an extract from James Hogg’s The Brownie of the Black Haggs, in which the main body of the text is in English but the rhythm and dialogue are Scots.

MacDougall is forever attempting to keep alive our mother tongue and I remember reading a piece he wrote in The Scotsman in which he quoted one of Robert Louis Stevenson’s contemporaries, the antiquarian and folklorist Robert Ford, who even as long ago as 1891 was lamenting the eclipse of the Scottish language as “the snobbish element amongst the great middle class, ever prone to imitate their ‘betters’, affect not to understand it and there is a portion of the semi-educated working population again, who speak Scotch freely only in their working clothes”.

Ford argued, says MacDougall, that if we lose our language, we lose what made us Scots. We should prize the things which are inseparably bound to our native tongue: “That which cannot be translated into English”, he says.

He lists single words in Scots which cannot be expressed in a whole sentence in English: “think of fushionless, eerie, wersh, gloamin, scunner, glower, cosie, bonnie, splairge and plowter and try to find their equivalents in the language of the school”.

MacDougall says our language expresses what cannot be said in any other way. “Dreich”, he says, “doesn’t just mean dismal, nor does thrawn simply mean stubborn. Words like glaikit and sleekit have a visual element”.

MacDougall is very positive about our language, saying it is alive and well, despite innumerable forecasts of its demise.

He quotes Dean Ramsay who remembered a peculiar Scottish phrase very commonly used but which was going out of use: “to let on”, as in “Dinna let on ye ken”. MacDougall says it’s still widely used and I’ve heard it often in Langholm.

Ramsay regretted the loss of the diminutive saying “bodie, bit bodie, wee bit bodie” have gone out of practice but MacDougall says he has heard storytellers use several diminutives to describe one person. “He was an awfu wee sma toatie kind of bit of a manikin”.

This, then, is our speaker for the MacDiarmid lecture and I for one am looking forward to hearing him speak.

The lecture on its own costs only £3 or £16.50 if you have lunch.

I’m thoroughly fed-up of hearing and reading about the coming recession and how we’ll all have to tighten our belts as costs spiral and will continue to do so. We don’t need to be reminded every day by the media.

We’re reminded each time we buy groceries, each time we fill up our car tanks at the garage and with each electricity and gas bill.

And all those hints about how to save money. One woman singled out as an example grows all her own fruit and veg. That’s OK if you have a large garden.

She uses her swimming-pool filled with rainwater to bathe; and how many of us have outdoor pools?

The final economy which made me say get lost was her saving on moisturising cream; she uses the slime from slugs and snails instead to keep her skin soft.