Hear this episode at theallusionist.org/manywaysatonce.
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, try not to disturb language's nest.
A couple of years ago in the episode called Oot in the Open, we talked about Scots, a language recovering from hundreds of years of oppression. Check it out for a bit of background on the language, because we’re returning to Scots in this episode.
On with the show.
HARRY JOSEPHINE GILES: When you dig in to the words that you can use for LGBT+ people, you realise how much ideology and how much social assumption is built into every word that we use. We have these kind of quasi-scientific terms - ‘homosexual’, ‘transsexual’, whatever, -that have their origins in 19th and 20th century sexology, and the assumptions of those disciplines are now built into how we think about ourselves.
And then we have kind of mid-20th century community terms like gay and lesbian, and later on transgender, that come out of particular political movements. And then we have reclaimed slurs like ‘queer’ and ‘dyke’ that have come in a bit later and that kind of indicate a sort of orientation to your orientation. So that's all there in English. And then when you dig into it in another language, it really exposes how all of that stuff is happening, and it gives you a kind of chance to like reimagine the way that you imagine yourself. It's not just that English kind of erases pre-existing contexts, but also the English kind of limits our imagination. The English's kind of supposed universality. Its pretence to be the language of science, its pretence to transparency and clarity: we don't realise what assumptions are laden in that.
HZ: Dr Harry Josephine Giles is a writer and performer and a doctor of poems and literary theory, specialising in Scots language.
HARRY JOSEPHINE GILES: So I write in Scots language and work in Scots language and as a trans person who works in Scots, I realised at one point that there aren't any widely accepted Scots terms for LGBT people.
And the reason for that is Scots's proximity to English as a language. So in the 19th, 20th centuries, Scots as a language is already in a considerable state of erasure, a considerable state of decline in most areas of Scotland. And so when these new terms were created and when these new gender and sexual understandings were created, they weren't translated into Scots because the language of science was just fully English at that point, and the language of politics was fully English at that point. So the terms didn't get created. People would just incorporate the English terms into their Scots rather than coming up with Scots terms for them. And that is a dynamic that is common for any language that is operating against English, or operating against the background of English.
And now that English is the globally dominant language, it's the case for other languages as well, where other languages might start adopting the English terms instead of coming up with terms that are particular to that language. By adopting English terms, it means because the loan words that we use are ideological, that means that we're also importing ideology and forms of gender and forms of sexuality from English and from English language culture at the same time.
When you've just taken a loanword, you import a way of thinking and you limit your imagination. And that's what, for me, what - I mean, I am a poet first. Language for me is a way of imagining things, and imagining things differently. And that brings me a lot of joy.
HZ: So Josie has been working on new LGBTQ+ terms in Scots.
HARRY JOSEPHINE GILES: Our behaviour and our desires will always exceed any terminology that anyone can come up with. And so rather than trying to find the right terms - and this for me is like what working in, what trying to come up with an LGBT Scots glossary does: it's a chance to imagine. It's a chance not to come up with the right way of saying things, but to say: what if we thought about it this way? What if we thought about it that way? What assumptions are built into the languages that we use?
HZ: For instance, the translation Josie came up with for ‘non-binary’.
HARRY JOSEPHINE GILES: Now I am going to say, speaking as a non-binary person, I absolutely hate the term, I cannot be having with it. It's so weird to define myself by the exclusion of the thing that is defining who I am. I don't get it. I just don't get it. So I was like, all right, I'm just going to throw all of the elements of that word out. What can I come up with?
Scots maintains prepositions that either never existed in English, either never existed in English or was lost from English. So we don't say 'outside of', we say 'outwith', or 'ootwith' actually in Scots. So things happening ootwith the hoose, or that's a concern ootwith my politics or whatever.
So, I thought if I'm gonna translate ‘non-binary’ why don't I use this beautiful word ootwith, which doesn't reference the binary? So I came up with as a noun form of ootwith, an 'ootwither'. One who ootwiths, which I really liked as a term both because it's so Scottish and it's a bit ironic in its Scottishness, but also because it contains the English term 'wither' in it, so it becomes this kind of wish, one wishes to wither the binary. So ootwither is now a term that I use to describe myself, and that, of all the terms that I came up with, that's the one that has caught on the most, which I'm very pleased about.
HZ: Several of the quasi-scientific terms, as Josie mentioned earlier, arrived into English from one source: Charles Gilbert Chaddock’s 1892 English translation of Richard von Krafft-Ebing's 1886 book Psychopathia Sexualis, which coined sexuality terms including heterosexual, homosexual, sadist and masochist - and bisexual, a word with a tricky history and present that we got into on the show a year ago. But Josie wanted to think differently to Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and wanted to get away from Latin and Greek - because those languages are not the default, they’re an active choice with connotations and assumptions also.
HARRY JOSEPHINE GILES: I was thinking about how am I going to translate ‘bisexual’ into Scots? So I broke it down into bits, there's two elements to it: there's the bi- bit, which is this Latinate prefix for two, and there's the sex- bit, which is, you know, it's about who you want to have sex with. The suffix would probably be '-lin' rather than '-ual'. So a simple translation is 'bisectlin'. And that's a perfectly fine way of saying bisexual in Scots. But I also thought, well, if I avoid the Latinate prefix, I could say something else, and rather than it being ‘bisectlin’, I could say it's 'monie' rather than 'bi'. So it's not just about two. It's about many. So I came up with monie, and then I thought, well, sexual kind of emphasizes that having sex part of sexuality, which, you know, is a significant part, which many of us enjoy, but it's not all that encompasses sexuality, and we don't have to emphasize the sex bit. So what if, instead of saying bisexual, we said 'monie airtit', and 'airt' is a Scots word for direction or finding a direction, so it means 'directed in many ways at once'. So 'monie airtit', you are directed in many ways. Monie airtit. And it's not a perfect translation of bisexual. It's a term that means some different things and it could open up a different way of thinking about stuff.
HZ: It’s not only the English loanwords that are loaded with assumptions; some Scots words were too.
HARRY JOSEPHINE GILES: I also dug into older words and, as with, and as with other languages, the pejoratives, the negative words are always for... every term I use is obviously going to be loaded so let's just let's just relax about it a little bit. The pejorative terms are always for female masculinity or male femininity, for any kind of gender transgression. And male femininity is always constructed as suspicious and duplicitous and sometimes also lazy and useless. So a good word, a good old Scots word it is ‘faizart', which describes an effeminate and useless man. And female masculinity is always constructed as aggressive and dangerous and unattractive.
HZ: It's so unimaginative, isn't it?
HARRY JOSEPHINE GILES: Well, yes. If European gender is anything, it is unimaginative.
HZ: I realise that's a great understatement.
HARRY JOSEPHINE GILES: But that's because these terms all come from social systems. They come from heterosexuality as a social system, Or particularly from the kind of rural Scots background that I know, they are reflecting the kind of family that is expected to maintain a farm, and then they are reflective of the kind of family that is expected to maintain an industrial working class, like the languages are marking deviation from whatever the social system needs.
HZ: And yet, you could be an effeminate man and still do farm work.
HARRY JOSEPHINE GILES: Well, you could, you'd imagine so, wouldn't you? This is how femininity and masculinity are built, are constructed. That femininity becomes not behaving in the appropriate way for the man of the farm.
HZ: ‘Appropriate’. What a prison. It's a constant disappointment, how fragile a dominant social structure still manages to be to be.
HARRY JOSEPHINE GILES: Yeah, that's simultaneously extremely coercive and extremely fragile at the same time, right?
So all the words that I've talked about so far are Scots words that already existed and that tended to be pejorative. So they are pejorative terms for types of gender and sexual behaviour that are marked or that are not desired. But what Scots lacks at the moment is any kind of commonly used reclaimed slurs either that you might find in the later 20th and 21st century.
HZ: What, like queer, say?
HARRY JOSEPHINE GILES: Yeah, exactly. Like queer. I did not understand my sexuality until I came across the word queer. Genuinely, the word, the existence of the word, changed my understanding of myself, and it helped me do what I wanted to do. And I would love for Scots words to be doing the same things for people. I would love somebody in 10 years to happen across the word ootwither and think, oh, that describes something about me. And maybe with that word I can start doing the thing that I need to do. Language is really powerful that way.
HZ: Is there an equivalent for the word ‘queer’ in Scots? I realise that the word queer is enormous and multivariant.
HARRY JOSEPHINE GILES: There is no there is no currently accepted equivalent of ‘queer’ in Scots. And I can't think of a Scots-specific slur that could be reclaimed in the same way. But there are Scots words that have similar meanings that I'm quite interested in, and that don't have the same kind of slur history. So one word is 'unco', or 'unken', which, if folk have an interest in language, they might spot the Germanic roots in that it's an abbreviation of unkempt, unknown. So unco means 'strange', and that has the strange meaning of queer in it. Another word as 'antrin', which is a word for unusual or occasional, a thing that happens occasionally. So it marks the kind of minority-ness and strangeness of queer. But probably my favourite word, which I don't know if this is specific to Orkney or if it has a wider currency in Scotland, it might just be an Orkney word, but we have the word 'trowie' for magical and strange. So something that's trowie is magical and strange and disturbing. And that derives from 'trow', which is from the same root as 'troll'. So a trow is a sort of troll-like fairy figure, and from that we get trowie as magical and strange and disturbing. I would quite like to describe myself that way, as magical and strange and disturbing, so I am quite happy to be a trowie outwither.
HZ: You can really go anywhere when you're magical, strange and disturbing.
HARRY JOSEPHINE GILES: I would hope so. Through the other world.
HZ: Dr Harry Josephine Giles is a writer and performer; find more of her work at harryjosephine.com, and at the allusionist.org, I’ll link to a document she has written about LGBTQ+ lexicon in Scots; it’s very interesting.
And coming up in today’s Minillusionist, Josie has a suggestion for you if you’re interested in Scots or other minority languages. Or, yknow, languages.
MINILLUSIONIST
HARRY JOSEPHINE GILES: Wherever folk are, if they're interested in Scots, I would strongly encourage them to find Scots language writing and Scots language music and Scots language performance and, well, pay for it, ideally. It is hard to sell Scots language work. The market for it is smaller, and you know, the market does rule a lot of things. But the more people who are interested in reading and listening to and watching and talking about Scots, the easier it gets for those of us working in Scots to advocate for what we're doing and to convince people that it's worth doing. And it is a very small and vulnerable market, if I have to use that term, I just did. So that's one thing.
But more generally, I would say - and listeners to your show are hopefully going to be the most open to this: look, if you're interested in words, then get interested in language difference and language variety and multilingualism. The UK is an appallingly and aberrantly monolingual place. We do have multiple languages in the UK; we have multiple centuries-old languages in the UK. As well as English, there's Scots and Welsh and Gaelic and BSL and many other languages; and you can learn them, and you can use them. And even in countries that are marginally less monolingual than the UK, English is still extraordinarily dominant, and I think it does damage to our brains to only have one language. I think these brains are set up to know multiple languages and think about the world in multiple ways.
So folk don't just have to support Scots; what I would like folk to do, wherever they are, is to support multilingualism and language variety. Get interested in the languages and dialects in your area. They're going to be struggling - whoever you are, wherever you are listening, there are going to be struggling languages and dialects in your area; and they're exciting and they're interesting and there's an ecology of them that you can be part of. And once you start getting into that, it opens up your world. It can open up your world of gender and sexuality, if you like, but it can open up all sorts of different parts of your world. So learn the languages where you are, and get interested in multilingualism, is what I would say.
The Allusionist is a member of the Radiotopia collective from PRX. Find all the shows at radiotopia.fm.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
estovers, plural noun, chiefly historical: the right to take wood for fuel, repairs, or other necessary purpose from land which one doesn’t own, especially land of which one is the tenant or lessee. From Anglo-Norman French ‘estover’: to be necessary.
Try using it in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman. Thanks to Ian Steadman. The music is by Martin Austwick of palebirdmusic.com.
Next episode we’re going to the opposite side of the world but staying on the topic of LGBTQ+ vocabulary in oppressed languages, this time Maori; and if you identify as LGBTQ+ and speak a language that isn’t English and have opinions on its usefulness or inadequacy for expressing concepts of gender and sexuality, I would love to hear those opinions - you can find me on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram @allusionistshow.
And you can hear all the episodes or read transcripts, learn further information about every topic, see the full dictionary entries for the randomly selected words, browse a lexicon of all the words that have been covered on the show, at theallusionist.org.
