if yi canny unnirston thim jiss clear aff then
December 22, 2018 2:14 PM Subscribe
Glaswegian poet Tom Leonard has died. Here he is reading perhaps his most famous poem “Six O'Clock News” (text).
(the title is from “Good Style” from Six Glasgow Poems [1969], his first major work)
(the title is from “Good Style” from Six Glasgow Poems [1969], his first major work)
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posted by limeonaire at 4:19 PM on December 22, 2018
posted by limeonaire at 4:19 PM on December 22, 2018
Did not know of him, but having watched the video, I want more.
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posted by Splunge at 5:54 PM on December 22, 2018
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posted by Splunge at 5:54 PM on December 22, 2018
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posted by Joey Michaels at 8:35 PM on December 22, 2018
posted by Joey Michaels at 8:35 PM on December 22, 2018
RIP
Did the style of that poem trickle down into / is it to be thanked for Scottish twitter?
posted by stinkfoot at 9:53 PM on December 22, 2018
Did the style of that poem trickle down into / is it to be thanked for Scottish twitter?
posted by stinkfoot at 9:53 PM on December 22, 2018
I'll resist the temptation to reference the poet McTeagle.
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posted by zaixfeep at 11:28 PM on December 22, 2018
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posted by zaixfeep at 11:28 PM on December 22, 2018
the style of this poem
(Canadian here; please, if you have more accurate information, correct me.)
The style of this poem is the idiomatic, and correct, way to spell and speak Scots.
Scottish people on twitter may or may not participate, to varying degrees, in the use of their local language on that service; just like any other language. The fact that it is mutually intelligible with English is at best a coincidence due to shared history and geography and at worst the result of colonial activity by the English dating back hundreds of years.
posted by Fraxas at 2:24 AM on December 23, 2018 [7 favorites]
(Canadian here; please, if you have more accurate information, correct me.)
The style of this poem is the idiomatic, and correct, way to spell and speak Scots.
Scottish people on twitter may or may not participate, to varying degrees, in the use of their local language on that service; just like any other language. The fact that it is mutually intelligible with English is at best a coincidence due to shared history and geography and at worst the result of colonial activity by the English dating back hundreds of years.
posted by Fraxas at 2:24 AM on December 23, 2018 [7 favorites]
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posted by Katjusa Roquette at 4:47 AM on December 23, 2018
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 4:47 AM on December 23, 2018
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posted by cardinalandcrow at 4:52 AM on December 23, 2018
posted by cardinalandcrow at 4:52 AM on December 23, 2018
Not a correction so much as a clarification to Fraxas’s point - Scots doesn’t have a single correct spelling system, thanks largely due to its 18th-century revival as a written/literary language coming after the bulk of standardisation of spelling in English. There are conventions but they’re looser. So it has a broad degree of flexibility, you can make it ‘sound’ more or less emphatically Scots as you want, which you’ll sometimes see in poetry and sometimes on Twitter.
(One convention the 18th-century poets made was to drop the old Scots quh- which you’ll see sometimes in older texts where English would have wh-: quhich, quhat, quherever. It stuck around a little longer as an abbreviation so you’ll still see ‘qch.’ in older documents where the word when spelled out in full appears as ‘which’. I love ‘quh-‘ and wish it had stayed around, but ah well.)
. for Tom Leonard. I love this one of his later poems, written for Mordechai Vanunu when he was elected Rector of Glasgow University.
posted by Catseye at 6:32 AM on December 23, 2018 [5 favorites]
(One convention the 18th-century poets made was to drop the old Scots quh- which you’ll see sometimes in older texts where English would have wh-: quhich, quhat, quherever. It stuck around a little longer as an abbreviation so you’ll still see ‘qch.’ in older documents where the word when spelled out in full appears as ‘which’. I love ‘quh-‘ and wish it had stayed around, but ah well.)
. for Tom Leonard. I love this one of his later poems, written for Mordechai Vanunu when he was elected Rector of Glasgow University.
posted by Catseye at 6:32 AM on December 23, 2018 [5 favorites]
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posted by cichlid ceilidh at 3:38 PM on December 22, 2018