Dictionaries of the Scots Language defines bumbaze simply: “to perplex, bewilder, stupefy”.
An early example comes from William Hamilton of Gilbertfield in his The History of William Wallace (1722): “The Siege thus rais’d in Hurry and great Fray, The bumbaz’d Suthron [English] scamp’red all away”.
Turning from war, George Smith’s 1824 Douglas Travestie and Miscellaneous Pieces described its opposite: “Love is a fashious thing, how it bombazes A’ the daft gouks wha it gets in its power.”
The following century, a Scotsman article covering the newly published (1993) New Testament in Scots cited this passage: “[the crowd] war fair bumbazed, ilkane o them, tae hear the Apostles speakin in his ain leid.” However, a letter also published in 1993 in the Scotsman deplored a legal decision involving a young man using Scots in a court of law: “I wis baith bumbazed and scunnert tae read this morn that a shirra had dung doon a chiel for saying, ‘Aye’. The minstrel shirra himself (Sir Wattie Scott) will be fair birlin in his graff; aye, he will an a.”
Stuart A. Paterson’s poem Here’s the Weather (2017) gives us this usage: “Fae stooshie tae fankle tae bouroch tae dreck / we’re steeped in the downpour of dialect / which foosts & bumbazes & shoogles & heezes, /skites, dights, invites us, unites us & frees us.”
More recently, in Scotland’s Linguistic Launscape (2022), Ashley Douglas addressed: “The relationship atween Scots and Gaelic…” as “anither aspeck o the rowth o Scotland’s linguistic launscape that can lea fowk a wee bit bumbazed.”
Scots Word of the Week comes from Dictionaries of the Scots Language. Visit DSL Online at https://dsl.ac.uk.
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