Nearly 30 years ago an academic at an English university made up a word that must have riled up more folk than any other in the long history of the Scots language.

Clive Young, an educational technologist, was looking for a way to talk about the booming world of IT in the mither leid. He came up with wabsteid for what, back in the mid-1990s, was the equally newly minted English term website.

It took a while for Dr Young’s word to take off. But when it did, even in a very modest way, it sure rankled the most ignorant and boorish fringe of online British nationalism.

The year before last lexicographers decided to include “wabsteid" in the Dictionars o the Scots Leid (DSL) along with a whole range of new words and terms, such as tonto and the increasingly ubiquitous taps aff.

Cue, well, deranged and disproportionate abuse. One anonymous unionist social media activist said wabsteid was “insane”, another described it as “gibberish”.

The Majority, a pro-UK website, despite well documented evidence to the contrary, claimed nobody used the “made-up" word.

Goodness. All words are invented, as surely every child knows?, and new ones are coined every day, in every language.

And we know “wabsteid” really is used – by some speakers if certainly not all – because dictionary compilers have come across it in the wild enough to warrant listing it in the DSL.

Me? I don’t care what anybody calls a website in any language. And I am going to guess that, even among the broadest Scots speakers, the English term is overwhelmingly more common than Dr Young’s 1990s calque.

But I think it is worth thinking why “wabsteid” has proven so triggering for those with a visceral hate of minority languages. It is because the word is a tiny part of an as yet ill-defined, organic, disorganised attempt to “normalise” Scots, to pull the old tongue out of its tea towel and souvenir mug status. In this case to talk about the internet.

We have seen backlashes before as governments try to boost the prestige and the visibility of minoritised languages. Gaelic at the Mod? Cool, no problemo. Blue Tick. But what about the same language on the side of a police helicopter? Yikes, no! Big Red Cross.

Same with Scots. It is (kinda) tolerated in the newspaper funnies as long as it is called slang, patter or dialect. Use it to talk about computer wizardry and, jings, crivens, help ma boab, some folk will just lose it.

Doom-scroll through Twitter and you might imagine there was some kind of debate on whether Scots was a language or not. Nah, there is not, not really, not among anybody remotely familiar with the topic.

For what it is worth, Scots is officially recognised as a language by every academic or state or international body that matters, not least the Council or Europe and Unesco. It would be very, very weird if it was not.

But hidden behind all of the social media noise there are much more interesting debates: what KIND of language should Scots be; how, where and when should it be spoken and written?

Do we want to use it for IT? For news broadcasts? For parliamentary debate. School lessons? For Herald columns? For signs at burger joints? Or will it remain as a largely low-prestige, low-register spoken variety or niche literary form?

This is where the inventor of wabsteid comes in again. Dr Young has just published a very readable and thoughtful book called Unlocking Scots (Luath Press, £16.99) in which he thrashes out some of the real and concocted stushies around the language.

He does a particularly good job highlighting two contrasting policy approaches to Scots.

The first is Normalisation, the idea that the language can or should be used in contexts where right now it just is not.

The second is Heritisation, essentially a desire to preserve Scots as a heritage variety in very specific contexts. Advocates of this stance will often say the language “has its place”, by which they mean it is not welcome everywhere.

Normalisation is, as it happens, what Catalans call the multi-generational project to revitalise their language that began after the fall of the Franco dictatorship.

We are talking about more than just street signs and menus in Catalan, but schooling, media and more too. Have these policies killed off Spanish? Of course not. But let us not pretend that Catalan Normalisation laws have been uncontroversial or easy.

Dip in to the angriest depths of Union Jack Twitter and you would think mainstream Scottish nationalists support normalising the Scots language Catalan-style. They do not. Dr Young details how the SNP in particular has largely eschewed Normalisation as it tried to portray its nationalism as “civic”.

He has a point: many leading Scottish nationalists are anglophone Central Belters who find language politics uncomfortable and unfamiliar.

There are a surprising number of people who don’t quite “get” this simple political reality.

Would it be fairer to say the actual position of the SNP and, indeed, its mainstream unionist opponents, is closer to heritisation? I think so.

Indeed Dr Young reckons what he calls the “dead hand” and the “odd ideology” of heritisation is dominant. But does it have to be this way?

“Heritisation and normalisation can be regarded as the extremes of yet another Scot language continuum,” Dr Young writes. “Normalisers demand the renaissance of Scots into an all-purpose modern language but heritisers prefer Scots to be locked into its current ‘heritage and retro’ state of disrepair, a quaint cultural curio and artistic resource for edgy writers.”

Me? I don’t think Heritisation works, even on its own modest terms. And I don’t sense any political appetite for Normalisation. So what next? Dr Young has some ideas. We should be thinking about them. Not to do so, to quote a new term added to the DSL along with wabsteid, would be a “wee shame”.