Nothing could have prepared me for the vocabulary I’d encounter at Dundee’s South Road Tesco.
I worked there for three years as a student, and you’d think I’d arrived in a foreign land, instead of 90 minutes up the road from where I grew up in Falkirk.
“Eh?” in Falkirk is a question: “What?”
So imagine the confusion when I came to the land where “eh” is “yes”.
It took me a solid month to stop repeating myself, when folk in Dundee were just agreeing with me.
But it was a relief to find “ken” was well kent here, after two years of bemused Glaswegian glances in the west.
So once I got over my ‘fleg’ at not understanding colleagues and customers, I realised Dundonian words were pure teckle – even if I’ll never call a roundabout a circle.
And since Dundee has such great taste in words, I was excited to hear that the new McManus exhibition, A Weather Eye, has a selection of fun Scots words involved – all to do with the weather.
I went along for a nosy the other night, and it did not disappoint.
Scots have more words for snow than Inuits?
Weather words are always quite nice, and Scottish folk have loads of them – haar, smirr, hoolie, braw, drookit, cauld, swelterin, skire, and – of course – driech.
You could put this down to the sheer variety of weather we have here, sometimes all in the one day.
But there’s something quite unique about just how in tune we are to the weather.
According to the exhibition’s curator Kirsty Matheson – who is bursting with enthusiasm and eager to tell visitors like me more about the exhibition – Scots has 421 words for snow.
That’s more than Inuit languages, she says, which are often credited as having the most snow-related terms.
A great one I’d never heard before is “feuchter”, which is that light, icing-sugar dusting type of snow which turns Newport-on-Tay into a gingerbread village across the water.
Kirsty points out her favourite word in the exhibition – “fissle”. It means the light rustling, like that of wind through leaves. I can’t get over how perfectly the word describes the sound.
But even more perfect is the way that the word has been matched to a piece of art.
A Weather Eye is no-fuss art for the people
It’s been paired with a piece called Larch on Easel, where the artist – Tim Knowles – has attached a pen to the branch of a larch tree, and let the wind rocking the branch ‘draw’ a picture.
Not my kind of thing, visually. But I can just imagine the ‘fissling’ of the pen against the paper. It’s pleasing, seeing the thought that’s been put into these wee touches.
Suddenly I’m going round trying to match all the words to their respective pieces of art. But I soon lose track of my mission, taken away with the art itself.
I’m not hugely educated about art.
But you don’t need to be able to discuss the inspirations or know the ins and outs of the artists’ lives to get something out of this.
Exhibition is a ray of sunshine on a cold winter’s day
Weather is something we can all relate to. We encounter it every day. Deciding what to wear, how to travel, where to go, what to eat – it all depends, in Scotland, on the weather.
A Weather Eye manages to capture it all. Paintings depict washing flapping in the wind, a desolate donkey in a field of snow, a ray of sun finally breaking through the clouds after what you just know has been a never-ending downpour.
There’s some more abstract ones – Jon Schueler’s ‘A Storm At Sea Remembered’ is all pinks and purples, a huge monster of a painting that makes you feel as if you’re falling right into the sky.
As it goes, that’s the idea; the painter was a pilot, Kirsty tells me.
This is what’s cool about The McManus – there’s so much knowledge and thought behind everything here. But there’s none of the snobbery you might encounter elsewhere.
Only Dundee could turn talking about the weather into a high art.
Which weather word do you like best? Drop it in the comments below so we can find Dundee’s definitive favourite weather word.
Conversation