All Jock Tamson's net-surfers

and finds a braw notion in action.

Should you aye be stravaigin the Net juist mibby ye'll hae come across a braw notion for the weans. The Scuil Wab is just part of a new electronic package launched by the Scottish National Dictionary Association this year to help kids stay in touch with their native tongue. Part of their new website, the Wab complements their already published support material for teachers, and Scots School Dictionary. It uses colour graphics to entice mini loggers-on to become word snowkers - sort of semantic truffle hounds listening out for Scots words they've heard used in any part of their lives.

Or, as the site has it: ''tak tent o onie Scots wors used by yer freens or faimillie the day. Or mibbie ye've seen a Scots word in a buik or newspaper, or heard yin on the TV? Tell us whit Scots words ye ken by fillin ooot the form ablow.'' The invasion of the Internet is just part of the SNDAUs determined push to ensure the revival in Scots usage travels the same information highway as the age group it's most keen to reach. As editorial director Iseabail Macleod acknowledges: ''There's no question that the amount of Scots used has receded in the last 250 years, yet it's not so much disappearing as being used by fewer people.'' The obvious antidote to that pattern is to grow your own linguists and over the last few years with the arrival of superb teaching aids like The Kist, the Scottish educational establishment - however belatedly- has now got the Scots bit between its teeth.

Iseabail and her colleagues are now celebrating a fresh excitement on their patch - news that their lottery application towards a CD Rom version of the schools dictionary which runs amusing activity-based programmes alongside the basic learning text. A grant from the lottery's New Directions fund was matched by the Carnegie Trust and the result, hopes the SNDA, will be ready access to a guid Scots tung for surfers of all ages. The target audience, however, is the upper primary and lower secondary classes, encouraging the younger participants with Scots versions of standard childhood favourites like an electronic Auld Macdonald's Ferm inviting you to match pictures of animal to captions like forkietail and puddock, a Scots version of The Meenister's Cat, not even to mention a Blear-Ma-Ee (''call my bluff'' to those of us still semantically challenged by our own rich heritage.

There are echoes of that fun element even in the written support materials now available to teaching staff with songs, stories, poems, and cartoons of crabbit cats and fleein' grannies.

Of course the adult component in this exercise also needs to be well motivated - not much use having eager beaver kids with a teacher who doesn't much see the point of it all. But, according to Iseabail, the training colleges have taken that on board and there's been little resistance from the staff room.

As with all cultural ventures in Scotland there are conflicting opinions as to how best we might revive Scots usage at all levels. The more pedantic tendency tends to get its breeks in a bit of a fankle over original spellings, and, at the more obsessive end of the enthusiasts' scale there are those who would try and find a Scots word to replace every part of our exchanges.

That hardly seems the most practical option given that some of the words pressed into service would have been languishing in the conversational dustbin these many centuries.

While Isebail and her colleagues steadfastly avoid being drawn into that kind of debate, their belief is that you can only change habits and enhance Scots language use naturally rather than by disinterring words long since discarded by a multi-cultural world.

You could argue, too, that a mix of English and Scots is both practical and less startling to the ear than Gaelic sentences suddenly punctated by phrases like satellite dish and astronaut.

It seems to this depressingly mono-lingual Scot that what most matters is that bairns from Galloway to Wester Ross, from the Borders to Caithness are all encouraged to make the language of their community and their home a normal part of the rest of their lives.

Already, thankfully, we've mostly got over the hurdle of having them leave their natural tongue at the school room door. Now the richness and status of that vocabulary will be further reinforced by their finding their thoughts echoed on screen as well.

You might reasonably have supposed that stray surfers from elsewhere in our global visit might be gey dumfoonert by visiting the SNDA website. But never underestimate the enthusiasm of the ex- pat Scot, however many generations removed from his or her origins. So, among unexpected words snowkers are Californian cousins anxious to report that their offspring can still tummle their wilkies wi' the best o' them. Gaun yersel' Elmer. The SNDA will take all the help it can get.

n The SNDA website, including the Scuil Wab, can be found at http://www. snda.org.uk