MOLLIGRANT

FRIENDS at the Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL) have flagged to me that there has been quite a lot of correspondence about Scots words for “complain”, and suggested that one might make a good Word of the Week. Happy to help!

Scots has indeed many fine words for complaining, ranging from straightforward compleen through gronach and grumble to rather obscure peenge and yirm. One of my favourites is molligrant, which can be both a noun and a verb.

DSL’s first citation of the word (in one of many spelling-variants) dates from 1811, from the Roxburgh poet Andrew Scott, a “peasant-poet” from the period: “Waes me, the mulligrumphs she’s ta-en”. Walter Scott (no relation) deployed the word, describing how a correspondent’s “molligrunts so hampered me as to cost us at least one novel”, and the word has persisted ever since, not restricted to the Scottish Borders. A colourful Aberdonian grumbler is recorded from 1930 thus: “Fat 're ye haudin a’ the malagruntin’ aboot, ye discontented vratch?” And the novelist Helen Pryde, in one of her (once) well-known McFlannel books from 1947, records a determined piece of Glaswegian career advice: “e’s going to be a teacher, and none of his molliegruntin – or yours either – ’ll make me change it”.

The word’s origins are sadly obscure. DSL considers it to be a variant of molligrups “a fit of melancholy or sulks”, relating it to English mulligrubs, which is “[perhaps] a fanciful formation”. The Oxford English Dictionary does not add much, suggesting that mulli- comes from “mealy”. OED links it, rather desperately I fancy, to an Australian expression meaning “wichetty grub”, an eater of fruit trees that is shaped like a corkscrew.

Scots Word of the Week is written by Jeremy Smith, Professor Emeritus in English Language and Linguistics, University of Glasgow.