A Doric Dictionary

By Douglas Kynoch

What’s the difference between a meggie-monyfeet and a hornie-gollach? Between snap-an-rattle and murly-tuck? All is explained in the Doric Dictionary. It is a two-way lexicon of words and phrases drawn from the former Banffshire in the North through Aberdeenshire to the Mearns and North Angus and drawn from the published works of most the North-east’s best-known writers of the 19th and 20th centuries. As the writer says in his foreword, ‘There is not one monolithic form of Doric but a multliplicity of forms; and words can change not only from county to county but from village to village’. The Dictionary contains no fewer than eight variants of the term for a seagull. This new version (2018) is enhanced by a most stimulating injection of Buchan vocabulary drawn from W. P. Milne’s historical novel, Eppie Elrick.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Luath Press
• Release date: Apr 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9781912387762

Douglas Kynoch

Douglas Kynoch was born and brought up in Aberdeen, where he attended the Grammar School and Aberdeen University. After a year in Germany, he returned to his native city at the time when Grampian TV was about to open and was appointed one of their first announcer-presenters. After six years with the company, he moved to the BBC in Glasgow, becoming the Glasgow presenter of Reporting Scotland and the Mr Scotland of the Nationwide programme. After a Christian conversion, he left the BBC to join a Christian radio station. The following year, he returned to Queen Margaret Drive as one of the presenters of Good Morning Scotland, continuing to work in radio till his writing career began in the 1990s. His first book, Teach Yourself Doric, became an immediate best-seller.