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FEBRUARY UNCO
This common little word has a weight of history behind it. Its earlier appearances in Scots betrays its ancestry. In a report in G F Black's book Some Unpublished Scottish Witchcraft Trials (1941), he reports on a Scottish witchcraft trial of 1661: Being asked what coyne the money was shoe ansyred that it was ane wnquoth coyne and knew it not. This is the close cousin of the English word uncouth and it shares a common Anglo-Saxon origin. The loss of the th is not unusual in Scots as shown by mou, claes and wi for example. This is how we end up with the modern form unco. In the Scots of Orkney and Shetland, we find an alternative form influenced by Old Norse unkunnr and the Orcadian (20 Apr 15 1995) reports the sad tale: Oscar, the uncan cat who arrived here unbidden and took up his abode, suddenly began coughing with real kirkyard cough. For most Scots speakers, the sense of unknown no longer applies but it is quite easy to see how the meaning drifted from unknown or strange into the sense of unusual or even eerie, in the way that R L Stevenson used of second sight in Catriona: It's an unco thing to see too far in front. This meaning is still familiar to most Scots but in many instances the meaning is weakened until it is reduced to a general intensive epithet in Tam O Shanter: getting fou and unco happy It has uses in a religious context too in the unco stool also known as the cuttie stool or stool of repentance and the unco guid, referring to the religious elect that we find in Burns' Holy Willie's Prayer and James Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner. |