JOCK SCOT Stevenson means absolutely zero in Scottish poetry, for
instance.
The people of Scotland naturally think of the Scottish language as 'Scots,' and only literati could think of it as anything else. The traditional name was founded by a real poet, Gawin Douglas. who probably got it from current practice. It is customary to call a national literary language by the national name, whether Scots, French or Russian. Those who have grounds for denigrating the nation- ality of the Scots may well prefer such pet names as Lallans. Couthy kailyairdery and false comic humour are the main faults of Scottish life and literature, and have been since the eighteenth century, when the uneasy sense of Scotland's tragedy was being awkwardly laughed off by the literati. These faults have led to the Scot becoming a music-hall joke: Harry Lauder was the logical outcome of the degeneration of national dignity that set in with Burns. Many southerners have but to hear that one is a Scot to become immediately jocular and to call one 'Jock'; the music hall has done its work. The intellectual equivalent of 'Jock' Scot is 'one of the Lallans boys.' Lallans is music-hall Scots. Whatever our ill- wishers may call us, let us at least restore the simple dignity of our national tongue's own name. Or shall we scrap 'Gaelic' also and have 'Hielans' instead?—Yours faithfully,
• TOM SCOTT
56 Gilmore Place. Edinburgh
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