Hi' listers, the incidental use of old Scotish words, sayings and phrases on this list, prompts many subscribers to ask their origins and meanings. Maisie Egger, self confessed Glaswegian, [ or as we in the south of Scotland, often referred to the Glaswegians as '' Glesca Keelie's '' ], is one who keeps us all thinking, when she throws in the an old, but rarely used word or two, whether it be in the Glasgow twang or the Wigtownshire twang, it invariably gets sorted out. To her request today, regarding the demarcation of bairn and wean. To my mind, there is no demarcation, the use of both words were and still are, widely used in the south of Scotland as well as other regions of Scotland. However, I have noticed, in my travels, that people in the counties in the east of Scotland and the border counties used the words bairn/bairns more than wean or weans. While on odd words, and sayings, '' the back road '' easilly comes to mind, where did it come from? For every major highway in Wigtownshire connecting towns or villages, there is a '' back road, or the old road, in most cases, the original road. If you were to ask the location of a farm and it was off the main highway, you would be directed to go by the back road, rather than go by the B 32 or the A 55. Most of these roads followed the coast and connected with all the coastal villages, and are still widely used today, mostly by tourists and locals travelling to the commercial centres, and in Wigtownshire there is an absolute maze of them, and that is what makes the south of Scotland so unique, I have never heard the phrase used anywhere else, does anyone else know. Len.

Len, Your reference: "While on odd words, and sayings, '' the back road '' easily comes to mind, where did it come from? For every major highway in Wigtownshire connecting towns or villages, there is a '' back road, or the old road, in most cases, the original road. If you were to ask the location of a farm and it was off the main highway, you would be directed to go by the back road, rather than go by the B 32 or the A 55. Most of these roads followed the coast and connected with all the coastal villages, and are still widely used today, mostly by tourists and locals travelling to the commercial centres, and in Wigtownshire there is an absolute maze of them, and that is what makes the south of Scotland so unique, I have never heard the phrase used anywhere else, does anyone else know." -------- When I tracked down "far-out" cousins in Auchencairn, Kirkcudbrightshire, they and their neighbours, who were invited in to visit me to see if they knew anything more about my father's forebears, mentioned going "up the back road." As they lived on Main Street, which was the main street of Auchencairn, it was indeed a back road to "somewhere else" or a circuitous route to the main road. We also used the term back road in Glasgow as distinct from a main route to get to one's house. Same applied when some of my relatives lived in Haddington, East Lothian. It would seem, then, that "the back road" is commonly used in various places in Scotland as an aside from the main road. Should we discuss bread? Pan loaf. square/plain loaf, half a loaf,...which it isn't, depending on where you come from? Perhaps not as we are straying a bit, but again, looking at the larger picture of what families ate, the topic of bread is not so far off the scale. The history of Ireland cannot be told if one does not talk about potatoes and the Great Famine. Maisie

Hi Len, In my experience the term "back road" is as English (certainly I used it growing up in Yorkshire) as it is Scots, and used here in Pennsylvania too. But one has to be careful about identifying the "back road" with the original road. In one particular case, if one is going from Newton Stewart to Wigtown, one could take the main road, or the "back road" that hugs the Cree (and incidentally goes past the aboriginal McKeand stamping grounds of Barsalloch and Borrowmoss), but the back road was only completed in the 1800s as I understand it. Crawford.