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Oxford English Dictionary is hoaching with new Scottish words

Oxford English Dictionary is hoaching with new Scottish words

BBC News25-06-2025
The Oxford English Dictionary is hoaching with new Scottish words - with beamer, bummer and tattie scone among 13 new entries.There is also a listing for Scotland's shoogly subway trains - not the kind of place where passengers would want to risk using skooshy cream.Many of the colloquial new additions have a food theme, with Lorne sausage, morning rolls and playpiece also making the grade.Oxford English Dictionary (OED) editors say they will consider a new word for inclusion when they have gathered enough independent examples of its usage "from a good variety of sources".
They said there also has to be evidence that a word has been in use for a "reasonable amount of time".The Scottish additions are among nearly 600 new words and phrases in the dictionary.
What new Scottish words are in the OED?
Aye, right - A sarcastic phrase - used ironically to express contempt or incredulity. Similar to "yeah, right".Beamer - A term for a flushed or blushing face, especially one resulting from embarrassment. Extended to mean a humiliating or shameful situation. Bummer - A person in a position of authority. Normally used in the expression "heid (head) bummer". It sometimes has a humorous suggestion of pomposity or officiousness.Chum - To join someone as a companion, as in "I'll chum you along".Hoaching - Crowded, swarming or thronging. It is derived from the verb "hotch" - to swarm', dating back to 1797.
Lorne or Square sausage - Sausage meat formed into square slices that are grilled or fried.Morning roll - A soft white bread roll, its first usage dating back to Farmer's Magazine in 1801.Playpiece - A snack taken to school by children to eat during the morning break or playtime. Also used in Northern Ireland.Shoogly - A word used to mean unstable or wobbly. The OED cites it being used to describe to describe Glasgow's unsteady subway carriages.Skooshy - Applied to anything that can be squirted. Whipped cream squirted from an aerosol can is often called "skooshy cream" north of the border.Tattie scone - A type of flat savoury cake made with flour and mashed cooked potatoes. Goes nicely with square sausage on a morning roll.Well-fired - Refers to rolls baked until brown or black and crusty on top.
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Key people in Edinburgh University's slavery and colonialism inquiry
Key people in Edinburgh University's slavery and colonialism inquiry

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Key people in Edinburgh University's slavery and colonialism inquiry

The legacies of some of Edinburgh's most celebrated professors and graduates have come under new scrutiny, after new evidence emerged about their roles in forming and perpetuating racist theories, or donating money gained from transatlantic slavery to the city's university. Edinburgh University will consider renaming buildings and repurposing some of its most famous events and prizes linked to these figures. The people named in the university's investigation into its own history and legacies of enslavement and colonialism include: A famous 18th-century moral philosopher and mathematician (1753-1828) who lectured Edinburgh students – including a future British prime minister – that black Africans were inferior to Europeans because they were 'savages'. He opposed slavery and said 'inferior' races could be perfected over time. Yet in common with predecessors such as Adam Ferguson at Edinburgh and the French philosophers Buffon and Montesquieu, he upheld the view that humans were ranked in six tiers, with white Europeans at the top. The university's slavery and decolonisation review said Stewart was the most popular lecturer of his day. Students, 'many of whom went on to elite careers in politics and imperial administration', crowded into his lectures. Some went on to build careers as race scientists. 'Through his pedagogy, he exerted great, if somewhat indirect, influence on the intellectual landscape of early 19th-century Britain,' the review found. The university's review has said renaming the Dugald Stewart building, a prominent modern block on its Edinburgh campus opened in 2008, would be a 'strong test case' for its new renaming policy. A former Edinburgh medical student, Dr Gunning (1818-1900) became extremely rich after settling in Brazil, where slavery was legal and endemic, to become a physician to the local elite, including Emperor Pedro II. He later served as a doctor and then commissioner for a major gold mining enterprise that exploited enslaved miners. Britain had outlawed slavery in 1833, making it illegal for Britons to enslave people, yet Gunning is widely believed to have held up to 40 enslaved people on his Palmeiras estate near Rio de Janeiro. He denied that, claiming they bought their freedom by working for him. Gunning invested in other colonial enterprises, including gold mines in India and shipping firms. He became a noted philanthropist, donating significant sums in Britain and Brazil, including funding numerous academic prizes, scholarships and academic posts at Edinburgh, particularly in theology and medicine, which are believed to have paid out millions in benefits to recipients. Those include three of Edinburgh's best-known current honours: the Gunning Victoria Jubilee prizes in medicine and in divinity and the Gunning lectures. The university's slavery and decolonisation review has found it holds £5.4m derived from his gifts. It has recommended that money be repurposed to fund anti-racist decolonisation projects and help pay for a new centre for the study of racisms, colonialism and anti-black violence. One of the most prominent advocates globally of the racist science of phrenology, which wrongly linked skull shape with intelligence, George Combe (1788-1858) co-founded the Edinburgh Phrenological Society with his brother. It gathered a skull collection absorbed by the university and still held by it. He also backed other phrenologists, including in the US, and wrote one influential text that heavily outsold Charles Darwin's Origin of Species. The Combe brothers studied medicine at Edinburgh. The Combe Trust was set up from the assets of George's estate (wealth partly derived from his writing and lecture tours advocating phrenology) and endowed the university's first professorship in psychology in 1906, known as the Combe professorship. The Combe Trust now funds a visiting fellowship in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities lasting two to three months. The fellow must deliver a lecture 'emerging from the interests of George Combe', on areas such as religion and religious education, physiology and health. The 'most distinguished' students in logic and metaphysics at Edinburgh each year are given prizes set up by Margaret Stuart Tyndall Bruce (1788-1869), an heiress whose mother was Indian and her father a Scots lieutenant in the Bengal artillery who had substantial estates in India, England and Scotland. 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Edinburgh University had ‘outsized' role in creating racist scientific theories, inquiry finds
Edinburgh University had ‘outsized' role in creating racist scientific theories, inquiry finds

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time11 hours ago

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Edinburgh University had ‘outsized' role in creating racist scientific theories, inquiry finds

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The investigation also found that: The university had explicitly sought donations from graduates linked to transatlantic slavery to help build two of its most famous buildings, Old College on South Bridge in the 1790s and the old medical school near Bristo Square in the 1870s. The donations were equivalent to approximately £30m in today's prices, or the higher figure of £202m based on the growth of wages since they were received, and as much as £845m based on economic growth since then. The university had at least 15 endowments derived from African enslavement and 12 linked to British colonialism in India, Singapore and South Africa, and 10 of those were still active and had a minimum value today of £9.4m. The university holds nearly 300 skulls gathered in the 1800s from enslaved and dispossessed people by phrenologists in Edinburgh who wrongly believed skull shape determined a person's character and morals. Fewer than 1% of its staff and just over 2% of its students were Black, well below the 4% of the UK population, and despite Edinburgh's status as a global institution. The report's authors said their findings raised serious questions about the university's role as the seat of the Scottish Enlightenment in the 18th and 19th centuries when it became famous for the work of luminaries such as the economist Adam Smith and the philosopher David Hume. The fact its history was in part 'connected to slavery and colonialism, the violent taking of bodies, labour, rights, resources, land and knowledge is deeply jarring, not least for an institution so closely associated with the humanistic and liberal values of the Scottish Enlightenment', it said. The report's authors urged the university to redirect the money from those bequests to hiring academics from Black and minority backgrounds and on research and teaching about racism and colonialism, partly to combat the institutional racism that permeated the institution, they argued. Among a sweeping series of 47 recommendations, the review's authors have also asked Edinburgh to support the unadoption of the definition of antisemitism published by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) because it stifled 'free conversation' about Israel's policies and actions in Gaza and the West Bank. Most UK universities recognise the IHRA definition. The review also called on Edinburgh to urgently sell off its investments in companies with significant contracts with the Israeli government. 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Ironically, Stewart and his mentor Adam Ferguson were 'lifelong abolitionists' yet their theories of race had been used to justify slavery in the American south. The university had to accept harsh truths about its past activities, as well as bask in its successes, Mathieson said. This review, he added, was the most extensive investigation of its kind carried out by any university in the UK. Sign up to The Long Wave Nesrine Malik and Jason Okundaye deliver your weekly dose of Black life and culture from around the world after newsletter promotion Mathieson said: 'I think a lot of the report is hard to read, but I have confidence in its accuracy because I trust the experts that have produced it. I think we were seeking the truth – that's really the purpose of a university, and it includes the truth about ourselves as well as the truth about anybody else.' Mathieson and university executives set up the review, which was chaired by Prof Tommy J Curry, a specialist in critical race theory, and Dr Nicki Frith, an expert in reparations, in response to a groundbreaking review in 2018 by the University of Glasgow on its links to slavery and the Black Lives Matter protests after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, which also affected Edinburgh. Among other findings was evidence that the university had invested endowments derived from African enslavement into government war bonds, colonial bonds and buying Scottish Highland estates, and had received money from taxes levied on ships transporting sugar and tobacco from those plantations. The university had reacted to the abolitionist cause with 'inertia', the report finds, by not joining three other Scottish universities and colleges who had petitioned parliament calling for the abolition of slavery, even though Edinburgh had professors at the forefront of abolitionist campaigning. 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A further review by the university has recommended the change of name should be permanent and that a new naming committee investigates renaming another modern building named after Dugald Stewart due to his theories of race. Mathieson indicated the university will accept many of the recommendations of the decolonisation review submitted by the 24-strong team of academics, researchers and consultants, but others would require consideration and external funding. 'If at the end of it we lose courage because we don't like the conclusions, that kind of invalidates the original decision to do the work,' he said. 'We knew that this was not going to be pretty.' The university will set up a new race review implementation group which will actively support the review's call for Edinburgh to establish a centre for the study of racisms, colonialism and anti-Black violence, he said, by helping find philanthropic donors and external funding, and find rooms for a community space. 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Key people in Edinburgh University's slavery and colonialism inquiry
Key people in Edinburgh University's slavery and colonialism inquiry

The Guardian

time13 hours ago

  • The Guardian

Key people in Edinburgh University's slavery and colonialism inquiry

The legacies of some of Edinburgh's most celebrated professors and graduates have come under new scrutiny, after new evidence emerged about their roles in forming and perpetuating racist theories, or donating money gained from transatlantic slavery to the city's university. Edinburgh University will consider renaming buildings and repurposing some of its most famous events and prizes linked to these figures. The people named in the university's investigation into its own history and legacies of enslavement and colonialism include: A famous 18th-century moral philosopher and mathematician (1753-1828) who lectured Edinburgh students – including a future British prime minister – that black Africans were inferior to Europeans because they were 'savages'. He opposed slavery and said 'inferior' races could be perfected over time. Yet in common with predecessors such as Adam Ferguson at Edinburgh and the French philosophers Buffon and Montesquieu, he upheld the view that humans were ranked in six tiers, with white Europeans at the top. The university's slavery and decolonisation review said Stewart was the most popular lecturer of his day. Students, 'many of whom went on to elite careers in politics and imperial administration', crowded into his lectures. Some went on to build careers as race scientists. 'Through his pedagogy, he exerted great, if somewhat indirect, influence on the intellectual landscape of early 19th-century Britain,' the review found. The university's review has said renaming the Dugald Stewart building, a prominent modern block on its Edinburgh campus opened in 2008, would be a 'strong test case' for its new renaming policy. A former Edinburgh medical student, Dr Gunning (1818-1900) became extremely rich after settling in Brazil, where slavery was legal and endemic, to become a physician to the local elite, including Emperor Pedro II. He later served as a doctor and then commissioner for a major gold mining enterprise that exploited enslaved miners. Britain had outlawed slavery in 1833, making it illegal for Britons to enslave people, yet Gunning is widely believed to have held up to 40 enslaved people on his Palmeiras estate near Rio de Janeiro. He denied that, claiming they bought their freedom by working for him. Gunning invested in other colonial enterprises, including gold mines in India and shipping firms. He became a noted philanthropist, donating significant sums in Britain and Brazil, including funding numerous academic prizes, scholarships and academic posts at Edinburgh, particularly in theology and medicine, which are believed to have paid out millions in benefits to recipients. Those include three of Edinburgh's best-known current honours: the Gunning Victoria Jubilee prizes in medicine and in divinity and the Gunning lectures. The university's slavery and decolonisation review has found it holds £5.4m derived from his gifts. It has recommended that money be repurposed to fund anti-racist decolonisation projects and help pay for a new centre for the study of racisms, colonialism and anti-black violence. One of the most prominent advocates globally of the racist science of phrenology, which wrongly linked skull shape with intelligence, George Combe (1788-1858) co-founded the Edinburgh Phrenological Society with his brother. It gathered a skull collection absorbed by the university and still held by it. He also backed other phrenologists, including in the US, and wrote one influential text that heavily outsold Charles Darwin's Origin of Species. The Combe brothers studied medicine at Edinburgh. The Combe Trust was set up from the assets of George's estate (wealth partly derived from his writing and lecture tours advocating phrenology) and endowed the university's first professorship in psychology in 1906, known as the Combe professorship. The Combe Trust now funds a visiting fellowship in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities lasting two to three months. The fellow must deliver a lecture 'emerging from the interests of George Combe', on areas such as religion and religious education, physiology and health. The 'most distinguished' students in logic and metaphysics at Edinburgh each year are given prizes set up by Margaret Stuart Tyndall Bruce (1788-1869), an heiress whose mother was Indian and her father a Scots lieutenant in the Bengal artillery who had substantial estates in India, England and Scotland. Her brother John Bruce was Edinburgh's professor of logic and metaphysics, while her uncle John bought Falkland Palace, one of Scotland's best-known medieval houses, and its surrounding estate in Fife. She inherited her father's and uncle's wealth after they died, which was significantly derived from her father's Indian estates. In 1865, she left £10,000 to the university for scholarships named in memory of her uncle Prof Bruce. The school of philosophy, psychology and language sciences still awards 'Bruce of Grangehill prizes', which have a current accumulated value of £1.6m, funds which may be repurposed after the university review.

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