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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.


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