my glaswegian
friends would appreciate her nous
liverpudlian
Reading the column, ‘Blind Date’ in The Guardian with the header, “‘I warned him if he was less than complimentary, my girls would hunt him down’“, where Trisha, 61, a yoga teacher, meets Neil, 65, a meditation teacher, I came to the question, Would you introduce Trisha to your friends?
Neil’s response was: Absolutely: my Glaswegian friends in particular would appreciate her Liverpudlian nous.
As Neil prefaced his statement with Absolutely that he would introduce Trisha to his friends, I decided that my Glaswegian friends in particular would appreciate her Liverpudlian nous was an accolade.
But what did it mean?
Blind Date is a short weekly feature in The Guardian made up of questions and answers from two people who are matched up at a restaurant for a ‘Blind Date’
In the responses this week, Glaswegian was used several times.
I had a feeling, more of a suspicion that the word might have something to do with Glasgow in Scotland, mostly from other allusions to Neil in the story but how do you get from Glasgow to Glaswegian?
I grew up in Michigan and we were either Michiganders or Michiganites while I preferred Michiganiac.
But Glaswegian?
Maybe he was a druid or a shepherd, like The Basques’ or something.
A little time with the Google and it turns out that it means someone who speaks the Glasgow dialect, also called Glaswegian.
I would make a comparison to the Low Country language known as Gullah but Gullah has been recognized as a ‘Language’ and Glaswegian is a dialect or a version of a language
From Wikipedia, “As with other dialects, it is subject to dialect levelling where particularly Scots vocabulary is replaced by Standard English words and, in particular, words largely from colloquial English. However, Glaswegians continue to create new euphemisms and nicknames for well-known local figures and buildings.”
Then it hit me that I had heard the word, Glaswegian, before.
In his travel book, Notes from a Small Country (London, Black Swan, 1991), about traveling around Great Britain, Bill Bryson tells the story of taking a cab to the Burrell Collection Museum in the Glasgow.
Mr. Bryson writes (and I am using his spelling):
Among the city’s many treasures, none shines brighter, in my view, than the Burrell Collection. After checking into my hotel, I hastened there now by taxi, for it is a long way out.
‘D’ye nae a lang roon?’ said the driver as we sped along a motorway towards Pollok Park by way of Clydebank and Oban.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said for I don’t speak Glaswegian.
D’ye dack ma fanny?’
I hate it when this happens – when a person from Glasgow speaks to me. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said and floundered for an excuse. ‘My ears are very bad.’
Aye, ye nae hae doon a lang roon,’ he said, which I gathered meant ‘I’m going to take you a very long way around and look at you a lot with these menacing eyes of mine so that you’ll begin to wonder if perhaps I’m taking you to a disused warehouse where friends of mine are waiting to beat you up and take your money,’ but he said nothing further and delivered me at the Burrell without incident.
So much for Glaswegian.
That left Liverpudlian nous, which I reversed to nous Liverpudlian so I could hammer it into my Haiku but not sure it makes an difference.
I am guessing that nous, French for we (not oui which is French for yes, which may have been a big reason I left French to people like my niece Joann who teaches French to kids in Kansas City which by itself can boggle the mind but I digress) means something like nuance or that je ne sais quoi that one has by being from Liverpool.
When my Dad disembarked from the Queen Mary to the City of Liverpool in World War 2 he wrote my Mother that the city reminded him of Detroit … the bad parts.
Start with that and roll in the Beatles and I think you have the essence that is Liverpudlian nous.
So Neil feels that, absolutely, his friends, in particular the ones who spoke Glaswegian (‘D’ye nae a lang roon?) would appreciate Trish for that certain air that being from Liverpool brings to someone.
Indeed, a match that could only be made in heaven.
No Haiku For You 