ISHBEL McFARLANE: “You crap so much that you sunk a ship you were on.”
HZ: I’m gonna use that.
Allusionist 166 Fiona part 2 transcript
HARRY JOSIE GILES: I don't think that anyone should come away from this conversation not wanting to use the name Fiona. I think this is a beautiful and rich history. It might not be quite the history that you imagined, but I think it's a beautiful history.
Read moreAllusionist 165 Fiona part 1 transcript
HARRY JOSIE GILES: Fiona is a name I think now that still has a slightly romantic, slightly historical Scottish feel. I think everyone thinks it's an old Scottish name, but it's not an old Scottish name!
Read moreAllusionist 117 Many Ways At Once transcript
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?
Read moreAllusionist 78. Survival part 2: Oot in the Open - transcript
ISHBEL McFARLANE: I remember speaking to a friend of mine and saying, "I used to have another language, I used to be able to speak another language." And she was like, “Speak it then.” And I remember not having anything, I couldn't say anything.
HZ: This is Ishbel McFarlane, a theatre maker and campaigner for the Scots language. Although for many years of her life, she did not want anything to do with the Scots language at all.
ISHBEL McFARLANE: So my mum and dad deliberately brought me up speaking Scots when I was wee, partly because they both grew up in moderately complicated but Scots language environments, and they were themselves Scots language campaigners, and so they really wanted me to have access to it. So that would be my sort of home language. But then because of a whole load of reasons, centrally that it's not seen as a language by many people, I wasn't allowed to use it at primary school or at nursery or playgroup or even when I was with my friends and their parents.
MICHAEL DEMPSTER: There's no name for our language, apart from "Shut up" or "don't talk like that".
Read more