Mind your language
I HAD meant to write about Tower Hamlets' silly sign, 'Running the East End', pasted up last weekend around the sweaty old London marathon route (which is like that water company adver- tisement, 'Running London's water'). The trouble is that my mind is almost as muddled as my handbag, where I am sure I put some interesting notes about signs on the sides of vans, and so on.
Never mind; Mr Cecil Ritchie, from Tigh na Craig, Clachan Seil, has written to tell me about the joys of Scots place names, a subject about which I know nothing whatsoever.
Apparently there is an independent television programme which aims at teaching Scottish people to speak Gael- ic. Mr Ritchie is quite keen, and has dis- covered that the name of his house means House on the Rock. That makes sense. He also says that one down the road called Tigh na Truish means House of Trousers. That seems a strange name, but he gives it circum- stantial credence by referring to the criminalisation of the kilt after the Jaco- bite uprisings; so at Tigh na Truish they sat down and wept as they swapped their plaids for trews, or triubhas, as they call them in Gaelic.
Trousers is certainly an unusual word, and it is of Celtic origin. The Irish spelling is trius; a trewsman is a wearer of trousers; in English it is now only in vulgar speech that trousers is used as the plural form. And it is only men's outfit- ters who say, 'Ooh, that's a very nice trouser.' Or so my husband tells me.
Dot Wordsworth
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