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July 2008
Scots Word for July
Bool
As the schools break up for the summer, how good it would be if our youth were to appear on the streets with their guttie baws (rubber balls), their skippin ropes, peeries (tops) and bools (marbles)! There seems to be little chance. I recently spoke to a class of second year secondary pupils and only one of them had ever played bools. With the decline of the game, we are losing a set of magical words: steelies – the large shiny ball-bearings that would easily take a chip out of your steenie – as my once beautiful blue and white marble plunker bears witness. We developed our aesthetic senses appreciating glessies in a whole rainbow of colours and we twirled cats' een between our fingers in wonder. Even humble cleys, the grey-brown stoppers from ginger beer bottles found a place in the bools poke (bag), handed down from an earlier, pre-screw-tap era. We'd play along the gutter and bemoan our own foolishness when a treasured possession rolled down the condie or syver (drain).
In figurative language, a person with an exaggeratedly refined accent would be described as speaking with 'bools in the mou.' If the 'bools row smooth', all is going well.
The earliest recorded use of bool in Scots is in the sense of 'cannon ball' in the Aberdeen Burgh Records of 1542. Since then it has been used to describe various round objects, including the woods used in the game of bowls, sweets such as the peppermint flavoured black-strippit bools, and the balls about the size of a tennis ball and weighing about four pounds each used in a game traditionally played on New Year's morning between Rosemarkie and Fortrose. It may also be used, almost contemptuously, of small potatoes, jist wee bools that are an awful scunner to clean.
