Listen to this episode and find out more about it at theallusionist.org/flyting
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, play in language’s string quartet on the deck of a luxury ocean liner. Why are my socks damp?
Today we’re talking about flyting. Flyting was kind of the rap battles of the medieval era and even earlier, rhetorical combat where poets exchanged well-wrought insults. Forms of this existed in many cultures around the world but we’re going to be concentrating on flyting in Scotland; it was very popular there in the 15th and 16th centuries.
If you’re here for respite from the present moment, then you’re going to get that. And if you’re looking for something to help navigate the present moment, I don’t have much, but I do have a couple of things for you that language gives us.
1. Nothing is permanent, language holds so much change all through time, all this evidence of previous nows and previous futures. Now is now and it’s not forever.
2. Language is fundamentally for connecting with other humans - and not all the connecting is good, but that’s what it is for - and while the culture of individualism has been causing an increasing amount of trouble, language is perhaps the greatest demonstration ever of a collective effort, so, we know that can happen and it continues to happen.
Also, in this era between AI and the power of professional liars, it’s going to be more of a struggle for words having meaning, but I’m not willing to let that go! I’m old fashioned that way!
But mostly I’m here to provide free podcasts for your diversion and infotainment, and also there are ten Tranquillusionists gathered at theallusionist.org/tranquillusionist for you if you need to unfrazzle your internal monologue for a bit.
And listen up, Pacific Northwest: tickets are on sale now for the live show celebrating the Allusionist’s tenth birthday, 2pm 12 January 2025 at the Rio Cinema in Vancouver BC, go get that early bird discount! theallusionist.org/events.
Content note: this episode about flyting contains brief references to historical capital and corporal punishments, and discussion of insults and slurs, most from hundreds of years ago but some of those still sting, and there is also a derogatory term for sex workers. Plus, category A swears. The strongest kind!
On with the show.
JOANNA KOPACZYK: Do you mind sort of abusive, vulgar language the podcast?
HZ: Slurs, I wouldn’t - but swears and body parts are fine.
JOANNA KOPACZYK: So I can say things like penis?
HZ: Penis is fine.
ISHBEL McFARLANE: “You crap so much that you sunk a ship you were on.”
HZ: I’m gonna use that.
ISHBEL McFARLANE: I’m Ishbel McFarlane; I am a writer and performer and Scots language activist.
HZ: Do you participate in flyting ?
ISHBEL McFARLANE: No, I'm far too nice girl! I have never in my life, have I, Helen, even had a thought about whether or not somebody's poos are larger than any vessel they may be travelling in.
HZ: Is this biologically possible? Does any creature do poos that are larger than any vessel they may be travelling in? Let me know. I'm not willing to google this myself, my search history has already suffered too much.
Insults and epithets like these were all part of flyting in Scotland.
ISHBEL McFARLANE: Flyting is a form of entertainment, basically, where people argue for fun, and insult each other for fun.
HZ: Like a roast?
ISHBEL McFARLANE: Yeah, exactly, but more two-way than a roast. Loads in common with contemporary rap battles. But in Scotland when we talk about flyting, we're talking about something that was around in mostly like 15th and 16th century. It involved a lot of insulting people. There were sort of political insults, there was like literary criticism insults; and it was a high art, so it was done for the king and queen in the royal court. Doing it in front of the king is sort of such an elite way of doing it. James IV, who was the king that it's sort of most associated with: being like a renaissance king was a big part of his self identity and part of a sort of change that he was making in Scottish culture at the time, building palaces and amazing warships, and writing as well himself and sponsoring and creating artworks and all these different things.
HZ: James IV was King of Scotland from 1488 until 1513, when he became the last British monarch to die in battle. But before that, he was famous for being well read, conversant in several languages, his interests included medicine, dentistry and alchemy, and he was a keen patron of the arts - particularly of some of the poets who were famous for flyting. James IV loved flyting, and flyting was really really popular then.
ISHBEL McFARLANE: And it was done by poets. So, in Scotland at that time, we talk about makars, which is a word that gets used now to mean general poets. It's like same route as ‘maker’. There was sort of, almost like class of, of almost like a national-ish poets for this country that was kind of at sort peak of certain stage in linguistic and cultural life. And they were so popular that when Scotland got printing presses for the first time, one of first things that were ever printed were some of these flytings. Because it had been an oral tradition. but they were recorded in these early days of the printing press so that they could be printed so that loads of people could read them because people loved it.
HZ: I'm just picturing court stenographers taking down on the little machines all the the flyting.
ISHBEL McFARLANE: One of the later bits of flyting - so we think of it as a piece of flyting now, but it itself talks about all the good old days of flyting - it's from around 1600, or just before that, and it's looking back to 100 years before, to like the golden era. And in that there's sort of an introduction that's like, “If only our arguments had to be in verse, then everything would be much better. if you had to take out your gossip or your bitching about people and put it into a certain kind of rhythm, then wouldn't we be a much higher society?”
HZ: I mean, there's certainly something to be said for that.
ISHBEL McFARLANE: Definitely.
HZ: If you have to channel and other potentially destructive emotions into rhyme, it forces you to process them a bit more before putting them out in the world.
ISHBEL McFARLANE: Totally. That's not to say that the writings as we have them aren't absolutely full of, well, obviously, scatological stuff, racism, ableism, all of those things that absolutely run through 15th, 16th century literature. So I wouldn't say that it creates a sort of utopia. But it does change the vibe.
HZ: It's not true to say "what happens in flyting stays in flyting" - as we'll discuss in a bit, there could be real consequences for things said in that context. But, flyting was an opportunity to say things that would not be appropriate or allowed in other contexts and other forms of speech.
JOANNA KOPACZYK: My name is Joanna Kopaczyk. I am Professor of Scots and English Philology at the University of Glasgow. I'm a historical linguist, essentially, interested in all kinds of ways in which language responds to context. I'm essentially doing something which can be called historical pragmatics, so looking at how people use language depending on who they talk to or what kind of situation they find themselves in, and just unpacking some historical contexts in in which that happens.
HZ: Let's hear an example of flyting between two of flyting’s most highly esteemed practitioners, Walter Kennedy and William Dunbar, whose flytings in the court of James IV were the earliest known published example of the genre, printed around about 1500.
JOANNA KOPACZYK: I can give you a sample of what Dunbar says to Kennedy:
“Cuntbitten crawdon Kennedy, coward of kind” - which means a cunt-bitten or a poxed coward or something like that -
“Ill-fared and dried as Danesman on the ratts
Like as the gledds had on thy gules snout dined...”
HZ: This is Dunbar saying that Kennedy is dried out on the execution wheel and looks like birds have dined on his red nose.
JOANNA KOPACZYK: “Renounce, ribald, thy rhyming, thou but roys,
Thy treacher tongue has ta’en a Highland strynd.
A Lowland arse will make a better noise.”
He's basically saying, “my Lowland butt will make a better noise than your Highland Gaelic poetry.” So that's the level of of abuse, a little bit of a gutter language there, but it can be quite funny.
HZ: What were some common terms that people would use and common tropes? Within the best of your comfort to describe those things.
ISHBEL McFARLANE: A lot of insulting of family, of your heritage, so they would be insulting each other's coat of arms as well. So that's a way of family allegiance. Kennedy describes Dunbar's coat of arms as being a noose and the motto is being "Hang Dunbar".
There was also insulting how the person looks, whether they're attractive, whether they have all of the things that are accepted as acceptable at the time. So that's where you get a whole lot of ableism now, when you're reading it. Then there's a lot of insulting each other as poets. So some of it really quite nuanced, and some of it is just like “Your mama”, you know?
HZ: I think it's a really interesting and valuable exercise to have to analyse what makes an insult funny rather than just upsetting. Like, what is the essence of funniness, rather than people just operating this assumption that being mean is in itself funny?
ISHBEL McFARLANE: Yeah. Some of it is really personalized and some of it could be said to anybody, you know, that the person shit so much that the boat sank.
HZ: I meeeeannn, who among us has not?
Apparently these flytings are the first appearance of ‘shit’ as an insult, not just a term for the substance, and also, when Walter Kennedy calls William Dunbar a ‘wanfucked foundling’, the first appearance of the word ‘fuck’ in literature.
JOANNA KOPACZYK: It was the first case where it was actually printed or part of literary language. Because you see the word 'fuck' being used, for example, in place names or in people's names; it comes up in Latin charters sometimes; people quote the the F-word because it was just a regular word, probably meaning something like to beat, some kind of beating movement. But then with these taboo connotations, this poem really is the first time when it comes up in in literature. So this is a Scottish claim to fame.
HZ: Well done, Scotland.
JOANNA KOPACZYK: Some of these insults and some of some of these verbal attacks are really quite ludicrous and they sound funny, and they are about using taboo language really. You can call your opponent a “beshitten leper”, for example, or you can criticize somebody somebody's physical appearance quite ruthlessly. It's not like there are things that are allowed or not allowed. Anything goes in flyting.
HZ: I'm wondering if there are any things that they were saying that were taboo then and now we're just like, “eh whatever, calling someone a witch is just fairly inconsequential, I do that on the average day.”
JOANNA KOPACZYK: Yeah, so I think it goes both ways, because sensitivities and sensibilities change, so things that we may find very offensive today may have just been a random thing to say in the past. And, conversely, some things that they said back then might be quite trivial today. An example of that might actually be some of the animal similes which you come across in flyting to a massive degree, so these contexts where the other person is portrayed as a particular animal is a very common topic.
And one of these animals that comes up quite frequently is an owl. That's quite surprising, isn't it? One of my favorite insults in the flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy is: "You irregular owl! You're an irregular owl!" But we don't see these connotations that were present in that insult when Dunbar was using that that phrase, because each of these animals had a specific cultural significance. An owl is a nocturnal animal so an owl has these connotations of being maybe shady and trying to hide and being sneaky. And today we would probably associate the owl with wisdom, wouldn't we?
HZ: Owls have small brains, their eyes are so big that their head cavity is mostly full of eye.
JOANNA KOPACZYK: Well there you go, maybe that's what they already knew in medieval times.
HZ: Maybe they’d done a lot of owl autopsies.
JOANNA KOPACZYK: The connotations with the owl in the medieval times are quite negative. And they were also perceived as treacherous. This creates a potential link to ethnic slurs, and it's in particular in relation to Jewish people. When you start unpacking that simile, suddenly you find yourself in a completely different world, because you know today we can say, "'Oh you irregular owl' - how funny is that?" But in the past when that insult was actually constructed as a potentially ethnic slur, or maybe to indicate that somebody had some shady business or they were untrustworthy, it was a really heavy duty insult. So there are these these things that we no longer unpack because we don't have that knowledge, or we don't have a ready knowledge of that culture and those cultural and social connotations. Which makes it so fascinating to study literature from those periods because you can really get an insight into how society worked and how people saw themselves and each other and what was abusive and what was not.
HZ: Something that perhaps softened the blows of these epithets was that they may not have come as surprises.
ISHBEL McFARLANE: They were actually pals: these people who are doing these arguments, they were people who were collaborating, they were working together. But they were doing these things just for the entertainment.
JOANNA KOPACZYK: The poets may have written to each other beforehand and tried various things out and sent each other a challenge and then the other person responded to it. So that's definitely evident in how the poems are structured, and it just gives us a glimpse into that collaborative practice which in fact may have been behind constructing those flyting poems.
HZ: That's really interesting: it suggests a bit more kinship, and mutual respect.
JOANNA KOPACZYK: Yeah, absolutely, I think they held each other in high regard. And there is evidence from from their other work where they literally mention each other and say, “I admire this guy.” So it's not like they engaged in these poetic contests because they felt the other person was not good enough - I think quite the contrary, you really wanted to have a good opponent so that your talent could shine in that context, and the other person responded in really clever and elaborate ways to which you then had to make your own response. So I think that would have meant anybody who engaged in flyting must have recognized the other party's preparedness and quality so that their own poetic prowess could bloom in that context as well.
HZ: And while hurling insults is in many ways fun, flyting could also take serious work.
JOANNA KOPACZYK: So here we're dealing with a verbal contest of poetic craftsmanship, and you have to prove to your audience that you were the better poet; and it's not just through insulting the other person, but it's also about showing the audience how skilled you were as a poet: in constructing the rhyme, in choosing elaborate metaphors, in using language in sophisticated ways. So even though very often flyting as a poetic genre is classed as this kind of low life verse - meaning that it has casual, vulgar connotations - and it's not treated as sort of high level poetry, but some of the metaphors and the types of elaborate insults, cumulative insults, that emerge from these poems are quite impressive really. But still it's very skillfully crafted, so it doesn't necessarily rely on simplistic literary patterns or creation, it also has quite a lot of sophisticated stuff going on. I mean, it has some basic things, like alliteration for example, That's actually one of the things that James VI very much promoted in his vision of what good flyting should be all about: he said use alliteration, because that power of language comes through in alliteration very strongly.
HZ: That's right: King James VI of Scotland issued advice about how to flyte well. The King!
JOANNA KOPACZYK: He is very much interested in the language of poetry in general. He's the kind of person who wants to position himself as this humanist monarch who knows everything about everything, and he's in the ultimate authority in all sorts of things, including poetry.
HZ: Witchcraft, then later witchcraft skepticism; how to be a King in theory and practice; Biblical translations; poetic technique…
JOANNA KOPACZYK: So he writes this treatise on how to write proper poetry in Scots, and one of the genres he comments on is flyting. And in fact James, in his treatise, he also says something like, "You should use poignant language. You should cut your verse short and hurl it over the heugh,” he said, so hurl it off the cliff, over the valley, it has to have that quality of of being thrown at someone easily.
HZ: I’m wondering how much he was commenting on aspects of the form that already existed or if he was like "This is what I prefer so I would like it if you did this."
JOANNA KOPACZYK: He wrote that treatise on how to write poetry when he was about 20 years old, so we're not talking about a mature, seasoned literary critic here. I think he was trying to, first of all, give advice to his courtly poets on what he enjoyed, and also show off his own literary knowledge and the knowledge of classics, the knowledge of literature that came before. He wasn’t inventing the genre. James VI was very much interested in literature and he surrounded himself by poets and by artists. Probably they were quite keen to follow these instructions that the king had had put down for them, you know the rules of poetry and and stuff like that. And in that flyting, you see references to witchcraft and those themes that really interest James.
HZ: Since a lot of flyting was being done at court, and you're pretty well obliged to suck up to the monarch if you want to keep your head and your body contiguous, how do you deliver sycophancy within the medium of comedic insult poetry?
JOANNA KOPACZYK: The main main purpose of the flyting was to insult and abuse the other person, so flattery and outward flattery wouldn't necessarily be part of that. However there are instances where flattery is smuggled in, for example by Sir David Lindsay, in the - what was it? - late 16th century. He writes a response to the to the king's flyting, and in that response he talks about the king running around like a “mad fornicateur” - which means, “Oh, the king is so virile.” So the poet is basically saying, “Oh that's such bad behaviour, you're running around chasing all these women!” But in fact he's flattering the king for his virility. And suddenly, that flyting becomes something of a flattery disguised as flyting.
HZ: Insults are more acceptable in flyting than every other time. Is this just sort of by common agreement? It's like, "Okay, you can say this and then you can't feel offended by it when the flyting is over, because that's just flyting's rules"?
ISHBEL McFARLANE: Yeah. So some of the things that you're arguing about in flyting, for example, like they do use sort of political arguments where they kind of accuse each other of treason and things that would just get you hanged, or hung, drawn and quartered, or serious life and death trouble, and even the act of slander. So not only would the sort of accusation - if the accusation is accurate, the accused would be in trouble - but the fact of accusing could get you in serious trouble. But in flyting, you get away with much more. And partly to do with the formalized nature of it, the approved nature of it, so there is some of that sense that there is an approved insulter and approved critic, who still has to toe the line, but it's a different line.
At the time, the fact of it, the high culture nature of it, gives the speakers much more license. And then that's part of, I think, why you then get this printing of it, because, well, it's super exciting. This is stuff that you absolutely could not print, even if it was like reporting what someone else had said, you yourself might be in trouble - but when it's official flyting from the court of Linlithgow or whatever, then you get away with it. So, yeah, that's a very interesting difference. And I think part of it is the high culture thing, the rhyme, the skill, the sort of class barrier. These are clearly educated men. So something that an uneducated person saying about another person would be treasonous is now delightful.
JOANNA KOPACZYK: There is a whole area of linguistic study which looks at impoliteness, essentially how do we unpack the reasons behind impolite linguistic behaviour, communication whose purpose is to break down - which is quite contradictory to what we normally think about communication where we would assume we humans communicate because we have some kind of common goal and a common purpose and so on.
But if you think about impoliteness, it's really about contradicting a common communicative goal, because you want to either criticize the other person or you're just telling them to fuck off because you don't anything to do with them, or they have offended you, or you're offending them because you're the baddie, you're the rude person, and you're breaking down the conventions of communication which are normally expected in a regular society, let's say.
So there's a whole field of linguistics which investigates those reasons why people engage in these disruptive verbal behaviours, and insults is a big part of that. So obviously there are all kinds of insults, but what counts as an insult? Again, we're coming back to the question of speech act. It is only an insult if you perceive it as one. And sometimes, in fairness, you may say things without them meaning to be insulting. So that space also gives you the opportunity to do that: if somebody is offended but you didn't mean to offend them, then that's exactly where that negotiation of meaning takes place.
HZ: Is it a bit like now when, if you are reasonably offended at something and someone's like, "Oh, it's just a joke. You don't have the right to be offended, because it's just a joke ?"
ISHBEL McFARLANE: Yeah, there is an element of that. The thing that flyting has, that that sort of situation, personal situation doesn't have, is that there's always this right to reply. It's always a two way thing. They're most entertaining when they're balanced. You want to see people who are at the same level, and I think that's part of the neutralization of these insults. And they're sort teasing each other about that, about whether or not they're upset or you're kind of like, “You're going to cry about this kind of thing.” And so that's definitely in there, that like, "Are you upset? Are you going to run to your mummy, are you?" kind of thing.
JOANNA KOPACZYK: In my own research, I was actually unpacking some of the most famous flyting poem thinking about the insults, which felt quite personal: they would body-shame them, essentially, criticize the other person's looks. We can respond to that on a very personal level, and even though you're my pal and we're just doing a verbal duel for the courtly entertainment purpose, how much of that is actually getting to me on a personal level?” Probably we'll never know what the perlocutionary effect was on that person, but it raises some questions how of a of a personal reaction you had to these insults, whether you could always withdraw and still be friends afterwards.
The very word ‘flyting’ is quite an ambiguous word, because it goes back to an old English verb fleetan, and fleetan essentially means to quarrel or to combat or to have some kind of an argument. So you could have that argument in the street, and then get into trouble for calling people names. And if you attacked somebody's reputation publicly, that person can challenge you, and obviously that might lead to a court case. Or sometimes it's about simply disrupting public peace - and that was a big deal in medieval and early modern times. We have to remember that Protestant Scotland had very clearly defined rules of of conduct, public conduct. We are talking about post-Reformation Presbyterian type of society where calling each other a witch, for example, or you know all kinds of epithets, may have been picked up by the local Kirk session, so by the local church church, religious courts, which then passed judgments on your good conduct and and you could go into real trouble by doing that.
So flyting in fact comes up as a term in legal discourse in Kirk session records, in the records of those courts which responded to the disruption of public peace in Scottish towns. So you have people being accused of flyting in the streets. There is a record in the Elgin material where the elders of the Kirk session - that judging panel, if you like - are probably talking about poets overdoing or overstepping doing something that was found quite unpalatable by by the community and the the Kirk elders. And this case made its way to the to the legal proceedings. So that's quite an interesting thing to notice, I think, again, giving you an idea of this fluid space between entertainment and what can get you into trouble, even if you're a poet, even if you have that poetic license, even if you're just doing it as a performance, perhaps they pushed it one bit too far.
HZ: People were convicted for using “injurious words” against somebody that would damage their reputation. Slanders related to family and lineage were also common.
JOANNA KOPACZYK: Like people calling each other, let's say, “thieves’ bairnies”, the children of thieves, so your parents were thieves; or “stealer of sheep” or calling somebody's mother a common whore and calling their sister a common thief - these accusations of stealing and thievery and bad conduct and prostitution, all kinds of disruptive behavior, so that comes up quite a lot in these legal proceedings where slander and flyting are really names for the same thing.
I've got a really juicy one here. In March 1542, a certain Janet called another woman a common whore, "pintle in pintle out whore" which means penis in penis out So she was describing what that other person yeah apparently did. “Friar’s whore, priest’s whore, monkey’s whore" - so that means she slept around with various priests, and probably that also gives you an idea of what conduct was linked to some kind of religious decline, because that's we are on the brink of the Protestant revolution. So it responds to all kinds of social themes and cultural themes and gives you an idea of what these injurious words may have been, what these slanders and these flytings were were concerned with.
HZ: One thing they were concerned about was witches.
JOANNA KOPACZYK: In Protestant Scotland, there was an idea that witches were among us and they were causing all kinds of disruption and trouble and they were quite dangerous. And there was a legal act which sanctioned witchcraft prosecution, and on the basis of that act people got arrested and people were put on trial and if they were found guilty of witchcraft, they could be executed in the most horrible ways: burned at the stake or or strangled at the stake. There is quite a fine line between calling somebody a witch and that's a slander, and the person who has been slandered that way can respond and say this is not true, and in fact the person who has first uttered that accusation, let's say, gets into trouble because you shouldn't be throwing around that type of really heavy duty insult at other people without having any kind of evidence. So saying these things can get that person into trouble. However, if the person who is accused of witchcraft is actually found guilty, that's a really serious situation they find themselves in, because that can lead to capital punishment.
HZ: What if one person was prosecuted for slander and the other person was prosecuted for witchcraft? Just to make sure all bases are covered.
JOANNA KOPACZYK: Yeah, yeah, just to cover the bases. As we said earlier, historical pragmatics is about putting language in context and looking at the contextual variables, so for example who is talking and in what circumstances and who the audience is of a particular utterance. So by way of unpacking these contextual elements, we can find out a little bit more about what makes slander an offense, whereas poetic flyting you can get away with. Quite a useful basic distinction between slander and flyting in that context is that slander, there has to be a truth value in it, so it can be tested for truthfulness. Whereas if you engage in in a poetic battle, insults in a flyting are meant to be there for more of an entertainment value, if you like, so nobody is going to go and double check if you were telling the truth, whereas with slander there has to be a judicial process behind deciding whether this was truthful or not.
And of course, if we're looking at witchcraft prosecutions, then looking for truth can be quite gruesome indeed because there were people, they were called witch prickers: they had a an implement with which to basically look for for spots on somebody's body which would respond to pain and therefore prove that this person felt pain. And if they don't feel pain in a in a spot that the witch pricker has identified then it means that they are a real witch and they are colluding with the devil because the devil makes them impervious to pain. So it can have real life consequences.
HZ: You mentioned that the the penalty for being found a witch was death. What was the penalty for slander?
JOANNA KOPACZYK: That's another really interesting aspect of Protestant culture in Scotland: you had to repent publicly. Everything was done in public. Everything had to be sanctioned by the other members of the community. For example, some punishments included things like wearing a sackcloth, or wearing a headband which would say ‘slander’ or ‘repentance’. Or you would be made to sit on that stool of repentance in a public space for a day or the weekend, or you could be put in in the so-called jougs, So these were basically like handcuffs and you would be cuffed to a wall somewhere public again or to the pillory. These were pretty gruesome social consequences for someone who was accused of slander and found guilty.
HZ: The prospect of punishment and prosecution probably wasn’t what deterred people from flyting, but at some point after its 15th and 16th century popularity in Scotland, flyting died away. What happened to it?
ISHBEL McFARLANE: I think there's partly a fashion thing. I think also the language, there's a shift in the language starting that time. At 1600, there's still a Scottish king in Scotland and an English queen in England. But three years later, James VI becomes king of the whole of Great Britain, and he tries to sort exorcise the Scots language from his mouth, you know? And so, Scots language literary traditions are not welcome in the court in London, where he moved the court down from Scotland. So that's a big shift, I think, for a lot of kind of literary and cultural things in Scotland, is this break that happens when the court moves away from being in Scotland.
JOANNA KOPACZYK: I think it stops in the 18th century when people really really get quite wound up about bad language and insults and you know it's no longer entertaining. It's like, we need to be rational and we need to be enlightened and that's how we want to present ourselves rather than you know call each other shitheads or whatever. It's not that it was always like that you know in flyting they were more elaborate and more sophisticated ways of insulting each other, but it does boil down to some vulgar humour in many cases.
HZ: This period also saw a big shift in the usage of and attitude towards the Scots language.
ISHBEL McFARLANE: So the time that we're talking about, the sort of height of flyting, Scots is the language of the court and the language of the king and the poetry and all of the sort of highest cultural things, including flyting. Whereas from around that time onwards, Scots has increasingly become a language only of a domestic sphere, because the language of the public life increasingly became the sort of Anglic language as spoken in London becomes the language across Scotland for what you speak when you go to see your king or your parliamentarians, or the language that you have to speak at school and at university and all these things.
HZ: But while English became the language in formal settings in Scotland, Scots still had a public presence in poetry, in song, and in comedy.
ISHBEL McFARLANE: So in these sort of entertaining modes, as a language variety, it becomes used in music hall, this specific cultural form that was like massive, like all of popular culture basically for several decades, and even in Scotland. There's musical traditions of the Scottish, Scots language comedy stereotypes, that sort of "It's a braw bricht moonlicht nicht the nicht" of a kind of Victorian Scotch is the way that you see Scots language in public. So when somebody insults somebody else in Scots and it's in public in some way, it must be funny, because that's why Scots is in public.
HZ: And Ishbel sees the lingering effects of that in how insults delivered in Scots language are not perceived to be so serious, because the Scots language itself is assumed to be not serious.
ISHBEL McFARLANE: You can say a word for word translation, even with like real cognates: so calling someone an arse versus calling someone an airse, it's much stronger to call someone an arse than it is to call someone an airse even though you can see the connection between those words. And, you would think that the meaning was exactly the same, but it's not.
HZ: It’s like shit and shite. Shite is much softer.
ISHBEL McFARLANE: Exactly, yeah.
HZ: Vowels matter.
ISHBEL McFARLANE: Totally. Totally. I'm always concerned to make sure that it's understood that Scots is a living language, and it's making this connection between these different eras in the history of Scots language. And sometimes there's that danger of the single story, there's a single story about Scots, which is: it's slang, it's not a real language; it's funny; it's not important, it's not valuable; and it's dead. Even as people are desperately attached to it, even as poets are writing in it and have written in it, even as there's this hundreds upon hundreds of years of history - not all positive history, where did Gaelic go from the court that Scots comes in? - but there is hundreds of years of history there. And it's really important not to deny that. A lot of the arguments that happen around the languages used in Scotland are just like 500 years old. But also, there are other, what we would now think of as more high art, things happening at the time. And the first Anglic translation of any of classical literature, any full bits of classical literature, happens in Scotland around this time, the Aeneid is translated. And so we know that there's this full range from the Aeneid to shit ships. All the way.
HZ: You heard from Ishbel McFarlane and Joanna Kopaczyk.
Ishbel McFarlane is a writer, performer and campaigner for the Scots language, you heard her on the episode all about Scots language, Oot In The Open. She also made a podcast series about the poet Edwin Morgan, so search for Edwin Morgan's Second Life in the usual podplaces.
Joanna Kopaczyk is a historical linguist, and Professor of Scots and English Philology at the University of Glasgow. She is involved in the Future of Scots, a collaborative project working on community-driven policy for the language. She features in the BBC documentary Scotland: Contains Strong Language, where she shows the first recorded instance of the word ‘fuck’ in the Bannatyne manuscript. I’ll link to Joanna and Ishbel and other resources at theallusionist.org/flyting.
The Alumsionists continue to be busy, and Nate DiMeo, our old friend and Toki Pona conversation partner, has a new book evolved from his exquisite podcast The Memory Palace, featuring beautifully written stories from American history that will make you think about the country in a new way. Order The Memory Palace book, order it now!
And remember Tim Clare from the Coward episode where we talked about anxiety? I heard from so many of you who loved that episode. Tim too has a new book out, called Across The Board: How Games Make Us Human [Sorry, I was wrong - it’s The Game Changers: How Playing Games Changed the World and Can Change You Too], it’s about the history of tabletop games and how they bring us together. So get Across the Board The Game Changers and The Memory Palace from your local independent book vendor.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
grampus, noun (pl. grampuses): 1. a killer whale or other cetacean of the dolphin family. 2. British, dated: someone or something breathing loudly and heavily.
Try using ‘grampus’ in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, on the unceded ancestral and traditional territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Martin Austwick of palebirdmusic.com provided the music.
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