This is not to suggest that we are a nation of complainers, but Scots does have some very good complaining words, and this is one of them. Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL) defines peenge in two parts: “To whine, complain, whimper; to speak in a querulous, whining tone; frequently in reference to poverty, real or pretended”.
Peenge has a long pedigree. Our earliest illustration is from John Lamont’s Poems of 1791: “the unhappy ne’er shall peenge to me in vain”. And later (in 1887) A D Willock’s novel Rosetty Ends gives us: “Pingin’ an’ grumblin’ because they haena been born wi’ a siller spune in their mooths”.
Andrew Dodds uses it to disparage the poor plover in his Antrin [Occasional] Sangs (1921): “The mavis is nae speckled dove, The lark nae peengin’ plover”.
But back to familiar complaints, in September 1998 the Aberdeen Press and Journal published a letter bemoaning the motives of a protest group: “Have they nothing better to do than girn and peenge”.
Two years later, the word makes an elegiac appearance in Ellie McDonald’s poem The Gangan Fuit (from Pathfinder, 2000): “Ae day suin I'll lowse the knot/an fae the poke'll skail/a smirr o rain,/a seagull's peenge,/a lang-forgotten look o love.”
More recently, Animal Fairm (2023) - Thomas Clarke’s Scots translation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm (which won the Scots Book o the Year) - has Major declaring no vested interest in the uprising he is advocating: “Masel, ah cannae peenge - ah’ve been wan o the seilie wans.”
Scots Word of the Week comes from Dictionaries of the Scots Language. Visit DSL Online at https://dsl.ac.uk.
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