Told y'all, he med 'em up!
(wink)
david
Mind you, I have heard there's a 1963 recording of Louie Louie which, if
played at a particular speed, never any other, will....
----- Original Message -----
From: Harry Gilonis <[log in to unmask]>
To: british & irish poets <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, August 15, 2000 2:33 PM
Subject: MacDiarmid's scriotic sense of sny
> I've spent a few sticky lunchhours repeating researches of a decade or
> so back into these matters. Filing, a good idea, etc. In the Norn lines
> MacDiarmid draws on a lecture by Jakob Jakobsen, "The Old Shetland
> Place-Names" (in _The Dialect and Place Names of Shetland_ (Lerwick,
> Shetland, 1897); and I had high hopes he'd also discuss SNY. As far as
> my speed-reading could tell, o such luck - nor is it in his
> _Etymological Dictionary of the Norn Language in Scotland_ (2 vols,
> London & Copenhagen, 1928 & 1932). Nor is there any joy in John J.
> Graham's _Shetland Dictionary_(Stornoway, Isle of Lewis, 1979; revised,
> Lerwick, Shetland, 1993).
>
> Nothing useful in Craigie's _Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue_ -
> from 'N' onwards it is still appearing, in small paperbound fascicles,
> which haven't got that far!
>
> John Jamieson's _Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language_ has
> only "TO SNY", to cut or sever.
>
>
> Joseph Wright's _English Dialect Dictionary_ (which despite the name
> covers Scotland up to Shetland) has ""SNIGH", 'to turn up the nose in
> scorn; to sniff contemptuously' - or 'to watch slyly'; "SNEE", 'to
> abound, swarm, be infested with'; and "SNAE", listed as from Shetland
> and Orkney, 'to cut'; but this isn't in Jakobsen's 2 lectures, nor his
> Dictionary of Norn.
>
> Nor do snae, snee or snigh turn up in Jamieson.
>
>
> An unsatisfactorily brief hunt through botany and mycology textbooks
> failed to turn up SCRIOTA in any glossary.
>
> Thanks for parallel lexical digging, Randolph; glad to be spared it!
> But I don't see a sudden influx of Gaelic as plausible in this very
> Shetlandic poem. Nor can I credit glossolalic invention; if the rest of
> the seemingly-impossible words in OARB have meaning, why suddenly throw
> in a joker? Not very Marxist! But I'm tempted by the idea of a typo
> from SCRIPTA. In re which, has anyone looked at the rough draft of OARB
> to see if the word appears there, and if so, how spelled?? (That
> appeared as the appendix to someone's book on the Big Huge.)
>
> Mustn't Linga (south of Whalsay) -
>
> regards
>
> Harry
>
>
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