Spyug song

A tweet in response to my last blog started a breakfast chat in our Scottish-English household about nature language today. I used the words blackberry and bramble interchangeably in the blog, as I always thought that ‘bramble’ was the Scottish equivalent of English ‘blackberry’; I use ‘bramble’ for both the bush and the fruit, but the English contingent in my house claims that ‘bramble’ is the bush, and ‘blackberry’ is the fruit – a fact which seems backed up by The Lost Words bramble spell (https://t.co/dvStuOrkBF). Before I worked at Sustrans I taught English as a foreign language for many years, and I still love language, particularly the variation in vocabulary and usage in dialects. Before #bramblegate (the breakfast one, not the ‘fashionable’ Masterchef one), the usual language discussion in our house was over my saying “so-and-so gave me into trouble”, which is ‘wrong’ in formal English, but right in the west. My husband saying he’s having a cheese batch for lunch is (apparently) right in the Midlands. Nature-wise, for me brambles are jaggy, if I lift a rock I find loads of slaters, and if I told my mum there were 40 spyugs on my bird feeders, she’d know exactly what I meant… At the weekend I went to the new Natural Selection exhibition at the Botanics, where the artist Andy Holden lists the dialectal terms given to a long-tailed tit nest (none of which I can remember four days later, but all beautifully descriptive). The exhibition also has a room full of turned wood sculptures by Geoffrey Leeson, based on the sonograms of bird songs. Having spent many hours on National Cycle Network routes across the country, trying to learn bird songs and calls, this visual representation was my favourite part. There was even one for the spyug.