What’s the difference between a meggie-monyfeet and a hornie-gollach? Between snap-an-rattle and murly-tuck? All is explained in the Doric Dictionary. It is a two-way lexicon of words and phrases drawn from the former Banffshire in the North through Aberdeenshire to the Mearns and North Angus and drawn from the published works of most the North-east’s best-known writers of the 19th and 20th centuries. As the writer says in his foreword, ‘There is not one monolithic form of Doric but a multliplicity of forms; and words can change not only from county to county but from village to village’. The Dictionary contains no fewer than eight variants of the term for a seagull. This new version (2018) is enhanced by a most stimulating injection of Buchan vocabulary drawn from W. P. Milne’s historical novel, Eppie Elrick.
