When my niece who lives in Lenzie, north of Glasgow, wrote that her elementary aged son had recited the Sair Finger in his class, it brought me up short that we never were exposed to any poems or literature in the vernacular when I attended school, except for the poems of Robert Burns. We were totally discouraged from using anything but standard English. Of late, there’s been a movement afoot to encourage the use of ‘dialectical’ works, among which are some easy poems for young school children, such as the Sair Finger. At this time I am reading James Barke’s Land of the Leal, in which Barke uses much of the dialect of Southwest Scotland, which is almost like a foreign language to those of us from such as Lanarkshire, or other areas of Scotland. Aberdeen, Angus and other parts of the east coast have their own speech patterns. Leal means faithful and true, but it has also been expressed as being where one goes in the afterlife. I doubt if this word is used nowadays. Some ‘proper’ Scots words or expressions are still retained in legal parlance, such as Not proven A verdict or decision of acquittal of an accused person. A sheriff is equivalent to a trial judge for one. When in court they are bewigged and gowned. A supposition on my part: it is most likely that many of our forebears used their local dialect, until the Scottish Education Act in 1875 (?) when a standard English curriculum particularly discouraged local speech patterns, with much emphasis being placed on learning a (European) foreign language starting at a very young age. (In my own case a choice of French, German, Latin at the age of 11 plus when one entered Secondary school). Maisie http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poetry/tags/early-20th-century-scottish-poems On this day in 1865, children's poet Walter Wingate was born in Dalry, Ayrshire. Wingate was the son of David Wingate, a noted local poet in Ayrshire, known as the "Collier Poet". Walter was also a noted watercolour artist in his lifetime, but is best remembered today for his volume of children's poetry which was published in 1919. His poems such as Sair Finger are much loved for their gentle humour.