Scotticism #2

muckle (adj.)

This is a word commonly used by Scottish characters in movies not by Scottish writers. So you've probably heard it before, even if you didn't know what it meant. No, it is not a blending of the phrase 'monkey's uncle', but who could construct a sentence which rhymed it with 'buckle' and have that sentence actually make sense.

It means big.

To review:

'He no can gie me a hurl in his muckle lorry.'

-lorry is an Englishism for for the Americanism truck.
-Scots uses a different negation, as exampled above.
-gie Scots for give.

A Note on Scots:
-Scots is not necessarily a Scottish dialect of English, unless you believe the difference between a language and a dialect is that a language has an army. Scots developed independently, but along side, English. Scots has much more influence from Danish, Dutch, Old Norse and Gaelic (which at the time had seperated from Irish Gaelic, due to a Pictish influence), among a few others. Scots borrowings from French are dated to different times that English borrows and they were pulled from different areas of life. Scots was less influenced by Norman-French of the Norman Conquest. Also, English and Scots started from different dialects of the language spoken by the Anglo-Saxon invaders of the 9th Century. Scots was the language of the Scottish Court, after it was moved to Edinburgh. Although when James the VI and I (6th James of Scottish crown and 1st of the English crown) moved to London and joined the Crowns, Scots began its slow decline, because he adopted English as the language of his London court and stop patronizing Scots poets (like, stopped giving them money, not annoying comments). Maybe Scottish Nationalist believe that Scots should be recognized as an official language of Scotland, along side Gaelic or Welsh in Wales.