The National:

UNIONISTS really can contort themselves into making the most bizarre pronouncements whenever an opportunity arises to put down Scotland – especially when it comes to the language.

As our readers will know, be it anonymous Unionist Twitter accounts or Labour MSPs called Neil Findlay, using Scots brings down a mist as red as Jackson Carlaw’s cheeks at First Minister’s Questions.

The latest prime example of this comes courtesy of Patricia Watson OBE, who was a West Scotland candidate for George Galloway’s All For Unity anti-independence party.

READ MORE: This major web browser is first to be available in Scots language

Michael Dempster had shared a fantastic resource on Twitter, offering an hours-long course learning about the Scots language and accent.

He tweeted: “If ye like ma descriptive linguistic tweets here a wheen o videos based on material A developed atween 2018 an 2020 gaun throu aw the foondation basics o Scots accents an Scots language.

“Nothin tellin ye ‘how tae talk’, juist explorin ‘how we actual talk’”

That tweet managed to find its way through to business owner Patricia.

She replied: “Anyone think most of this is just lazy spoken English? I exclude from that the use of actual Scots words such as wheen, braw, sapples, sine, glaikit, and many more I sometimes use, but laziness to move facial muscles gives us o instead of off, atween instead of between etc.”

The Unionist candidate seems to have a very interesting criteria for what a valid Scots word is – anything she uses is fine, and anything she doesn’t is raw laziness. 

It rings a bell. Tories going on holiday during an Afghanistan crisis is fine, Scottish ministers going on holiday at absolutely any time is wrong.

(And we wonder whether the byline on this article will make the cut or not...)

There is also the obvious point that there aren’t too many facial muscles involved in writing a tweet, unless perhaps you’re a Tory MSP, frothing at the mouth because you’ve just seen the only thing as vile as an article in Scots … an article in Gaelic.

Michael responded: "Lexical cognates are words which share an etymological origin. They often sound quite different in different languages, and may have similar, quite different, or even opposite meanings. Folk linguistics is the use of uninformed speculation rather than the scientific method."

Twitter, of course, also took Patricia to task for her remarks.

Uilliam Mac G made a key point: “Atween comes from atwene, which both English & Scots inherited from early Middle English.

“The fact that it has become archaic in modern English, but not in Scots, has misled you into believing it's not a real word and must therefore be a mangling of an English word.”

And plenty of others had more to say.

Patricia was awarded her OBE for services to business and disabled people.

We'll certainly be digging into the instructional video – perhaps she should too...