A cauld dreich day/week/month ... (hopefully not) year

Dreich

I've mentioned it before -dreich-drookit-and-mauchit. But I mention it again now because dreich is such an excellent little word and as it means dull, gloomy and bleak, it is also timely. A YouGov poll in January 2013 (yes, amazing the things governments spend their money on) revealed it to be Scotland's favourite word. You can put all your frustration and disgust into the 'dr' at the beginning and the ending even sounds like the 'yuck' that you are feeling and wish the word to convey. Try it. It can be quite therapeutic. Make your lips work. Hiss out the throaty gurgling "ch" at the end. Splutter a bit. Feel the angst leaving you. This is onomatopoeia at its very best.

Driech however might occasionally meet a situation where it needs to be beefed up - could the weather (if you can call it weather - I thought weather implied some degree of short term climatic change as opposed to the unmitigated rain, rain and more rain of recent weeks) - be described as 'very dreich' ? Or is driech an absolute adjective meaning that a little bit dreich, somewhat dreich and terribly dreich are all nonsense? It's either dreich, or it isn't.

Our recent weather is without question a beefing-up-requiring situation which is very definitely dreich (can you be definitely dreich? Hmm ... I think you can ... but what about 'very' definitely?!) -

However, when it's dreich outside but inside there is hot water and warm towels and an oven to warm soggy bottoms,

the world suddenly feels better.

Unless you live in Somerset and the hot, warm and oven-y bits of the anti-dreich measures above have been impossible for the past four weeks due to flooding and no power. Life then becomes truly dreich - truly dreich? You know what I mean. The pedant in me wants to cry "No!" You can't quantify an absolute term - not dreich and not any of the others, for example never, infinite and furious: never is never and is never almost never; infinite is infinite and is never nearly infinite; and you are either furious or not, you can't be a little bit furious. But my inner pedant cowers in shame, because it knows that I say these things all the time. And I suspect there's an argument in favour of a language flexible enough to embrace the breaking of grammatical rules, where the context is made richer by the rule breaking. So I'm going to leave truly dreich.

I hope you agree.

It is unfortunate perhaps that dreich can also mean dreary.

I hope this hasn't been.

Comments

Colour, Delacroix, flochetage and why don't we all have a go at inventing words

Yes - it is a real word. Flochetage. Well, a real-ish word. One invented by the painter Delacroix, when he found the dictionary cupboard bare and required a word to describe his technique of layering different coloured paints, using lightly pulled brush strokes to create texture and pattern and thereby enhance his base-layer colours (... lost? - stick around, read on and all will become clear. Or perhaps muddier ...). Flochetage implies both stringiness and threadiness. Apparently. And it sounds good - in a filling-the-mouth-with-sound sort of a way. Try it ... flochetaaaage. Not that I speak French. So I am probably mis-pronouncing it. Nor am I an artist. So what do I know about painting techniques - except that I think this one works. What I do like is the concept - you invent a new technique in whatever it is you do, hunt around for the vocabulary to describe it, find the dictionary is lacking, so make up a word of your own and announce to the world what it means. Delacroix isn...

My beloved boy, how lucky I have been

It's an odd thing that when we are waiting for someone to die ... and I say someone here even though the one in question was a dog - but to us he had character and a place forever in our hearts and was more of a familiar someone than some of the people in our lives. So, I'll start again - it's an odd thing that when we are waiting for someone to die, our senses go into overdrive. We notice things that normally would be part of the background of our every day. We breathe more - or rather, we don't but what we do is notice our breathing more, as we watch his. We pause. We think. We listen to ourselves and our inner voices speak. Memories flood our dreams ... though sleep is fitful. Why am I telling you this? ... ... we lost this beautiful boy today And in the hours before he went, I saw perfect spheres of dew on blades of grass - little orbs holding micro-images of our world; a bumble bee drunk on nectar, yellow-dusted with pollen, resting in a crocus; ten - yes, ten! ...

Walking, wondering and not walking at all

We all walk. I walk every day. I also lie. I don't walk every day, as in I don't take the dogs for a walk every day. Poor boys, in this season of tax returns and desperate seeking of extra work and working to pay the tax bill, they are the losers. Four-legged-friend was looking distinctly skinny in his hind legs, when I brushed his coat while he wolfed down his supper this evening (he tries to eat the brush if I take it near him at any other time, so meal times have become grooming times). Oddly, I lose out on the walking too, but this fails to have the same effect on my 'skinniness'... Anyway, we all walk. We walked on Christmas day - Littlest and I walked at the weekend - Slowly. Time to appreciate the trees. Time to encourage the smelly boys into the freezing water. Time for the sun to go down. Time to walk very, very slowly - Littlest's finger phone was engaged throughout in deep discussion with the zoo warden - da...

Walking The Dog

Search This Blog