adj. twisted, crooked, distorted; (of people) obstinate, intractable, etc
THRAWN is frequently used with reference to stubbornness and absolute conviction. A recent Sunday newspaper article described the Scottish Borders as having a "thrawn sense of self". Another article proclaimed Calum's Road on Raasay a symbol of "thrawn determination".
Given the example of Calum MacLeod, who built his two-mile road single-handed, thrawnness clearly may be an admirable characteristic. But as with so many things, perception is the key. When Irvine's famous son, John Galt, described the "set of thrawn-natured tenants" in his novel, The Entail (1822), no admiration was implied.
The word is derived from the Scots verb thraw, and shares its Old English ancestry with modern English "throw". One of the early senses of "throw" was to twist, entwine or turn, and this meaning survived in Scots, although falling out of use in English. In the latefourteenth-century account of The Bruce, by John Barbour, we find an early Scots usage: "And gif it fall that fortoune thraw The quheill (wheel) about".
Robert Louis Stevenson's Thrawn Janet (1881) also conjures disturbing, twisted images: "There was Janet, comin' doun the clachan - her or her likeness, nane could tell - wi' her neck thrawn, and her heid on ae side, like a body that has been hangit, and a girn on her face like an unstreakit corp."An echo of the title appears in a recent Scottish novel, Suhayl Saadi's Psychoraag (2004) , which uses Scots and Urdu vocabulary. When Zafar visits Glasgow's Botanic Gardens, the narrative follows his stream of consciousness through the Farsi, Persian and Arabic words for "paradise" and back into Scots: "Intae the gairdens, folks. Firdaus. Paridaeza. Jannat. Thrawn. Glais hooses. Ghost hooses."
Scottish Word of the Week is written by Maggie Scott of Scottish Language Dictionaries www. scotsdictionaries. org. uk, 27 George Square, Edinburgh, 0131 650 4149; mail@scotsdictionaries. org. uk.
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