The haunting new novel Clear (Bookshop|Amazon) by Carys Davies is set amid the Scottish Clearances of the 19th century, a relentless program of forced evictions that drove whole communities of tenant farmers off the land. The story concerns a Scotsman who struggles to communicate with one of the last speakers of Norn, a language of the Shetland Islands. The book includes a glossary of Norn words, such as leura, the “short, unreliable quiet between storms,” gruggy for “threatening weather,” and skump for “a fog bank.” This is part of a complete episode.
A Winter Dictionary (Bookshop|Amazon) by Paul Anthony Jones includes some words to lift your spirits. The verb whicken involves the lengthening of days in springtime, a variant of quicken, meaning “come to life.” Another word, breard, is...
Rosalind from Montgomery, Alabama, says her mother used to scold her for acting like a starnadle fool. The more common version of this term is starnated fool, a term that appears particular to Black English, and appears in the work of such writers...
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