SUSAN TIPPETT BRAITHWAITE

Today’s word is birl. Birl means to spin, whirl, dance, whirring or rattling noise; to move fast, bustling. You may remember seeing the word birl before in earlier entries: Dreich and Stramash.

Just a wee aside: A well-meaning person had informed me that I was incorrect in how I spelt the word fuck in Scots. He told me it was feck (I think this might be Irish), but that never sat well with me as it’s not how I say it. I say and spell it with a hard K (fuk). Anyway, I decided to look up the way I say it and think it’s spelt, and guess what? On Dictionaries of the Scots Language’s site, feck means something entirely different. And the site also confirmed that my spelling (fuk) was correct. So, from now on, I’m going with what my gut always told me. I thought I’d share that as I use fuck a lot, a lot, a lot, in my writing, and I don’t want to cause any confusion.

And on to the response to the prompt (taken from Running The Asset):

Trevor birlt bak tae Haas, wha’d gilravaged a hail server o caviar i less nor twa meenits, an wis noo stertin in the partan. Trevor nairrad heez een it the mannie ower heez gless. “They’re stull screengin the causey claen o the harins o the laist bodie wha ettled tae fuk iz ower.”

Haas choakit oan the partan he hid stappit I heez mou.

And now in English.

Trevor turned back to Haas, who’d devoured an entire salver of caviar in less than two minutes, and was now starting on the crab. Trevor narrowed his eyes at the man over his glass. “They’re still scrubbing the street clean of the brains of the last person who tried to fuck me over.”

Haas choked on the crab claw he’d stuffed in his mouth.