CommonFreddy Woo writes, "My wife thinks calling the front room a lounge is common. Worse, a friend of hers recently admonished her daughter for calling a toilet, a toilet. Lavatory darling. It's lavatory."
My own mother refused to let me use the word 'oblong' instead of 'rectangle'. Which is just odd, to be honest.
What stuff do you think is common?
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chthonic, Thu 16 Oct 2008, 16:06)
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Guid Scots, not Common EnglishSee, what youse are not getting is that in Scotland there's a significant intermingling of the related languages of Scots and English. Particularly in spoken language, particularly in Lowland Scotland (West Lothian, where I'm sat right now at work, being pretty much the epicentre).
And in Scots, the second person plural is... youse. It's analagous to the Texan usage of "y'all" (and its extended version of "*All* y'all"). Having a differentiated second person plural is really useful.
See also the perfectly correct Scots construction of "How no?" which translates to English as "Why not?" It's not bad English, it's good Scots, dropped into a different linguistic context.
Right, rant over, ya bunch o' Soothmoothers.
(, Mon 20 Oct 2008, 17:09, Reply)
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