GRIMLINS I HOPE folk attending the coming Orkney Folk Festival will have a good time, despite its virtual nature this year. Whilst many Scots on the mainland would describe our lengthy summer twilight as the “gloaming”, in Orkney it is described as the “grimlins”. The Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL) defines it as “twilight, the first or last gleams of daylight”. The word is derived from Norwegian “grimla”, to “glimmer, twinkle, blink”. In 1908, the DSL records this from the Old-Lore Miscellany of Orkney: “Bit alis, alis, whin da grimlins cam’ an’ he gaed tae geong hame feinty sheep nor shoon fand he”. Later, in 1922, John Firth writes in Reminiscences of an Orkney Parish (1922): “In the ‘grimmelings’ the youngsters were employed to strip the green peel off [the rushes] leaving the white pith, ‘as saft as silk’ which, swimming in sillock [coalfish] oil, barely made darkness visible.”
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How should we use Scots words? IN our Sunday edition last week, we ran a column by Rab McNeil headlined: “How did Scotland adopt a white horse with a big stick coming oot its heid as a national system?” It got us thinking about our use of Scots in The Herald. Senior Assistant Editor Garry Scott, who wrote the headline, says: “I thought it was appropriate to use Scots in this headline as Rab uses Scots terms in his copy. It was also a lighter piece. Would I have headlined a piece by, say, Iain Macwhirter or Alison Rowat, using a Scots term? Perhaps not.