Rankin’s vennel sin

vennel noun. LME.
[Old French vennel(l)e, vanelle (mod. venelle) from medieval Latin venella dim. of Latin vena vein]
1. A narrow lane or passage between buildings; an alley. Chiefly Scot., Anglo-Irish & north.

Whilst the "Great Greggs Experiment" is ongoing, I'll turn again to the gennel, which has attracted additional comment in the interim (okay, okay, it’s an additional comment, if I’m being completely honest). Other than my mention of the North-East of Scotland’s terms for bread rolls in the last posting, I’ve hardly touched upon the Scots Language (or maybe it's just a dialect of English?) and some of the fantastic words this has to offer.

I feel compelled to take on the mantle of ambassador for my adopted stateless nation and remedy the situation forthwith. Of the various Scots words I’ve picked up in my four and a bit years in Edinburgh, my two favourites are “footerie” meaning “fiddly” and “shoogle” meaning “shake” or “jiggle”. I’ve recently found out that these have some English regional variants, so I’ll perhaps come back to them at some point. However, there are also some very pleasing variants on the alley theme we can look at in the meantime.

It’s August. It's Edinburgh. It's the Festival. The city’s Royal Mile is a seething mass of humanity. Tourists and Festival goers take their chances amongst in amongst the press of leafleters, buskers, comedians, jugglers and actors of the Fringe. Flanking them on either side of the single mile between Edinburgh Castle and the Palace of Holyrood are some 83 alleyways. Like fishbones adjoined to the Royal Mile's spine, these historic pedestrian lanes spider their way down to Princes Street Gardens on the north and to The Cowgate on the south.

All 83 of these alleys are enumerated and their history described in the 122 pocket-sized pages of Close Encounters in the Royal Mile. Within this single mile there are to be found representatives of pretty much all of the Scots words for alleys. Gedde’s Entry, Mary Kings Close, Tolbooth Wynd and St John's Pend are all here and close by, off the Grassmarket, is The Vennel. These five words pend, entry, wynd, vennel and close are common throughout Scotland and some, or all, are to be found in the street names of each of Scotland's cities.

Of the five, my personal favourite is “wynd” although I do have a wee softspot for "pend" too. I spend quite a bit of my time in Aberdeen and Back Wynd can be found off Union Street, the city's main thoroughfare, as can the wonderfully named Correction Wynd; taking its name from the House of Correction which stood there in the Seventeenth Century. Aberdeen, of course, has its own distinct and wonderful variety of Scots: Doric. Again, something for another time.

Interestingly, in Glasgow a "close" is also what in Edinburgh is a "stair" - the communal flight of stairs in a tenement block. I'm not sure if Dundee or Aberdeen have their own alternatives for this. I'm sure someone will let me know.

So, in the names of streets the Scots regional variants for alleys seem to be alive and well, but I'd be interested to hear from native Scots about whether they use these words in their everyday speech. I'll finish, however, by returning to the theme of the modern pressures challenging linguistic variation. It is a story which relates directly to Edinburgh and to one of the vennels of the Royal Mile: Fleshmarket Close.

Ian Rankin’s Rebus novel Fleshmarket Close was published as Fleshmarket Alley in the United States. I had thought it amusing that the meaning of the word was thought to be beyond the ken of the American reader even when presented with a description and 300 or so pages revolving around the location. However, the blog entry on Sarah’s Bookarama entitled The Americanization of British Novels, reveals that the change to the title of this American edition is only the beginning.

It seems each and every blemish of regional linguistic colour in Rankin’s Scottish prose is excised in a hideous act of editorial plastic surgery, at least in the case of another of his novels, Let it Bleed. Judging by what Sarah writes, the cankerous boil of his deviation from standard US English forms, so hideous upon the face of his fiction, is well and truly lanced with the bright shining monocultural needle of US linguistic imperialism. I do agree with Sarah's comments about the way in which this detracts from the book and its atmosphere. Sadly, someone thinks it sells books; I do hope they're wrong.