Pathetic Amateur Linguists,

It’s been Scottish Cup day. Football managers try their best to sound polite and speak proper English in interviews. It’s always interesting to see the Scottish managers in interviews; they usually manage to speak in proper English - except Falkirk’s John Hughes – instead of the usual Scottish language they use all the time. That’s not a criticism of John Hughes. I don’t see why people should speak any differently in their TV interviews, as long as they’re not swearing repeatedly.

They’ll usually give good interviews full of all the football clichés using words for the English dictionary but the one word of the usual Scottish tongue that they never rectify is “wir” which sometimes sounds like “wur” and means “our”. It annoys me. I hate the word “wir”.

When I speak, usually economically, I use words that are in the dictionary but obviously I understand what other Scottish people are saying. Some Scottish words are good, “yon” is better than “that”. Most of the insulting names to call people aren’t in the English dictionary anyway so it doesn’t really matter where they come from but the Scottish word “nyaff”, meaning a small, irritating person, is quite good. I liked calling people “flumps” but that doesn’t have the meaning I give it in the dictionary.

All I’m calling for is an end to the use of “wir” whilst trying to speak the English that’s in the English dictionary. Gruff Rhys is in the picture, I could easily make a tenuous link between his recent sessions on BBC Radio Double One and BBC 6music to this post.