Yesterday, the Scottish Society of Northeast Louisiana held our monthly meeting. We now meet in the Monroe Jaycees building. I think it will be a fine meeting place for our 2007 year. For the program, we invited members to participate in a Scottish “Show and Tell.” One member brought a tartan that had belonged to her Scottish ancestor who had come from Scotland to Ireland to Charleston, SC. Though it was over 200 years old, the wool was still in reasonably good shape.

I showed the group my Collins Pocket Scots Dictionary, using a few Gaelic words for examples. Some of my recent favorites are deil (devil), wabbit (yes, sounds just like Elmer Fudd’s word) which means “to be tired, run down, out of energy” and hooley, which is the word for a wild party. The book is pocket-sized, and useful for anyone interested in Scottish Gaelic.

I’ve long been a collector of language dictionaries, as I believe they are a valuable tool for my writing. In one of these posts, I’ll share a list of the dictionaries I own, including several Native American dictionaries. I particularly want to write a post on my Comanche dictionaries.