Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL) describes wammelling as: “Of the stomach or its contents: to roll, to stir uneasily, rumble queasily”. It gives other definitions too, but for this piece we will stick with the stomach and its contents.
There is an early example cited from Robert Fergusson’s Poems (published in 1773): “They toutit aff the horn/ Which wambles thro’ their weym [womb, stomach] Wi’ pain that day”.
An “Amusing Anecdote in the House of Commons” was later reported in the Edinburgh Evening News in 1876: “Sir Robert Anstruther, in his speech on the Irish whisky trade in the House of Commons on Tuesday night, caused some laughter by quoting a story told by Dr Norman Macleod. A West Highlander, it seems, described Low-land whisky thus: ‘It simply gies a bit scaurt in yer mou and then gans away.’ Highland whisky, on the other hand, he declared, ‘kept whummling in the wame a’ day, and is a kind o’ friend tae ye.’”
We can all sympathise with Jean White when she writes in The Sea Road (1935): “I ate ower muckle panjottral [a hotch potch of food eaten at a party] at the weddin’ the other nicht, and my inside’s been waumlin’ ever since”.
However, fear is what the Traveller writer Betsy Whyte is describing here in Red Rowans and Wild Honey (1990): “‘Fits this ye were up to at denner-time then? Did ye like it? Eh?’ Looking at the tremble of his hands and the leer on his face, my stomach whammelled”.
Scots Word of the Week comes from Dictionaries of the Scots Language. Visit DSL Online at https://dsl.ac.uk.
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