Scunner

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Helen O’Reilly.

Hiya, Helen. Where are you calling from?

Las Vegas, Nevada.

Oh, great to hear from you.

Las Vegas, Nevada.

What’s going on, Helen?

Well, I’m originally from Glasgow, Scotland, and my parents both had strong Scottish accents.

And a word that I love that’s a Scottish word that I thought you might be able to tell me something about is the word scunner, S-C-U-N-N-E-R.

Scunner. Now tell us how you would use that.

Well, when I was a young girl, let’s say I would have a crush on a boy in class, and one day he would notice that I existed and return my interest, and suddenly I would take the scunner to him.

I would go home and my mother would say, do you still like Frank?

And I’d say, no, I’ve taken the scunner to him.

And what did that mean?

Well, it means to be disgusted with something, but it’s almost like disgusted plus, like disgusted and irritated, disgusted and frightened.

And I’ve never heard it used by anybody other than Scottish people.

This is really thrilling for me, Helen, because I have never heard this word in conversation, but I’ve read about it, but I’ve never heard it just in casual speech.

And I feel the poorer for that as a language lover.

Well, you can use it, you know, to say, well, you can say, did you enjoy the concert last night?

And you’d say, oh, it was a right skunner.

In other words, it was not enjoyable at all.

So I was hoping you guys could tell me something more about the word skunner.

Oh, yes, please.

Well, I don’t think that we know the origin of it.

I’ve seen suggestions that maybe it’s related to scare, an old word for scare.

Scurn is an old word that also means sort of the same thing?

Yeah.

My go-to resource for this is the Scottish National Dictionary, which I have a full set of at home, but also it’s been digitized and put online.

Maybe you’ve heard me talk about it before.

At the Dictionary of Scots Language online, which combines a bunch of different great historical dictionaries, and they have some really great treatment of scunner there.

There’s the verb.

Let me see if I’ve got this right and if this jives with what you’re saying, Helen.

It means to feel reluctance or to hesitate, to feel disgust, revulsion, or discouragement?

Disgust and revulsion, definitely.

Or if you scunner at something, you kind of shrink from it in revulsion, right?

You shrink from it.

And when I’ve said this word to my sons, who are half Italian, they think that it’s related to a word that they heard from their Italian grandparents.

Schifoso.

Schieve something.

So you have that SC or SK sound in the beginning, which just seems to be onomatopoeia.

It’s disgusting.

It is true how many of those SK sounds there are like that.

They’re not positive.

No.

And like skeeve, you made me think of that, which comes from Italian scifoso, meaning disgusting.

Yeah, and scorn, and even the SK sound that you hear sort of inside the word disgust.

Disgust, yeah.

The origins of this are lost in time, but it is distinctly a Scots word, distinctly.

Well, the Scots have, we have a lot of, well, we have a lot to answer for because we did invent golf.

Ugh.

Talk about a scunner.

I always love digging into the Scots dictionaries because there’s so many words that seem just ready to launch into mainstream English.

It’s just perfectly primed for it, and this may be one of those.

Yeah, so fabulously expressive.

Well, Helen, it’s great to take your call.

Thank you so much for sharing a little bit of the Scots language with us.

Thank you.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Scunner.

Scunner, if you have a wonderful word to introduce us to like that, give us a call.

The number is 1-877-929-9673 or email us.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.