HEEDRUM-HODRUM THE recent tartan days in Canada and the USA put me in mind of terms for Scottish traditions. I landed on heedrum-hodrum, though Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL) defines this as: “a derogatory term for Highland music”. Its appearance in the DSL dates from 1988 in Raymond Vettese’s collection The Richt Noise and Ither poems: “the spreit that lowps whaun it meets the swecht o oor true past, and greets no oot o seep-sappin heedrum-hodrum but oot o whit we were .”. However, it is not always used in a derogatory sense – as shown in The Times of August 1996: “Once in the Oyster Bar of the Cafe Royal in Edinburgh he used the traditional method of ‘mouth music’ to illustrate his pibroch . it was an incomprehensible ‘heederum-hoderum’ but they could not have known that the distinguished-looking kilted and bearded scholar was giving a demonstration of an art form which stretches far back into history”.