We may take or leave Scotch plaid, Scotch whiskey, Scotch tape. But, love it or hate it, there’s one wee bit of Scotland that can’t be avoided.
That’s the annual orgy of sentiment that comes with a countdown, a clinking of glasses, and a mournful swelling of a band, preferably Guy Lombardo’s: “Should auld acquaintance be forgot …”
“Auld Lang Syne,” which will be sung by most of us this New Year’s Eve, is one of the world’s best-known songs. Best-known, but not best-understood. Just what do those dialect words mean?
“A lot of us don’t know, either,” said Eddie Duffy, a Glasgow native who is bar manager of Kearny’s Scots American Club. Since 1931, it’s been a fixture in the Hudson County town that is probably New Jersey’s best-known hub of Scottish culture.
The language of Robert Burns, Scotland’s national poet, is a regional thing, he said. And “Auld Lang Syne,” which Burns wrote in 1788 (it’s based on an earlier, traditional song), includes a lot of words that are obscure, even to many modern Scots.
“Rabbie Burns came from more or less the highlands of Scotland,” said Duffy, who came to the U.S. in 1977. “There’s a whole lot of Gaelic in there.”
Words to the wise
Sometimes the meaning is evident from the context.
You don’t have to know that “Auld Lang Syne” translates to roughly “times long past” to get the point. Let’s drink to the good old days — that’s the gist of the song. Or as Burns would put it: “We’ll tak’ a cup o’ kindness yet, for auld lang syne.”
The cup o’ kindness likely being 80 proof.
But other meanings are as shrouded in obscurity as the Loch Ness monster. “We twa hae run about the braes, and pou’d the gowans fine …”
Come again?
Even Mr. Micawber, the master word-spinner of “David Copperfield,” was brought up short by that one.
“I am not exactly aware,” says Mr. Micawber in the 1850 Dickens novel, “what gowans may be, but I have no doubt that Copperfield and myself would frequently have taken a pull at them, if it had been feasible.”
Gowans, as a matter of fact, are daisies. The full translation of the line might be: “We two have run about the hills, and picked the daisies fine.”
And indeed, Rabbie Burns, as he is known familiarly to the Scots, was known to have pulled a few daisies in his time.
“Rabbie Burns, he was a bit of a rogue, wasn’t he?” Duffy said. “He liked his women. Typical Scotsman. I’m much the same. I’m not dead yet.”
Saving the culture
In Scotland, Burns is revered, not just as a great lyric poet, but also as a rebel who championed traditional Scottish culture at a time when the English were trying to suppress it. The English banned bagpipes in 1745 (they were considered an instrument of war), outlawed kilts in 1746 and tried to force the homogenization of the language.
The watershed 1786 Burns volume “Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect,” which included such pieces as “Halloween” and “To a Mouse” (“The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men/Gang aft agley”), was pushback.
“One huge reason why Burns is still celebrated is because he kept the language alive,” said Bob Duncan, financial secretary and past president of Kearny’s Scots American Club.
“When he was writing, everything was becoming more English,” Duncan continued. “The Scots felt that England was taking over, we were losing our culture. Burns with his Scottish dialect helped keep it alive.”
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No surprise that Burns should be a favorite in his own country. But he also travels well. Wherever Scots have migrated, Burns has gone with them.
Among those places: London, Ontario, where a young Canadian bandleader named Guy Lombardo heard locals saluting the new year with a Burns ballad: “For auld lang syne, my jo, for auld lang syne …”
Lombardo broadcast the song nationally, every Dec. 31, from 1929 to 1976. He made it synonymous with New Year’s Eve.
Multipurpose
And that’s another thing Americans don’t understand about “Auld Lang Syne,” Duncan said. It isn’t just a once-a-year song. Not in Scotland, anyway.
Weddings, funerals, graduations and scout jamborees wouldn’t be complete without it.
“It’s a song that is used all year round by the Scots,” he said.
Certainly that’s true in Kearny, another place to which Scots migrated — chiefly because of the mills, built by Scotland’s Clark Thread Company between 1875 and 1890, which attracted an influx of Scots workers. Some of their descendants, and others Scots folk like Duffy who were drawn to the place, are still there.
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The Scots American Club is a shrine to the culture’s soccer fandom. But they’ll celebrate anything Scottish — including Rabbie Burns, whose coming birthday bash is Jan. 20 and 21 (the poet was actually born Jan. 25). And whatever they celebrate, it’s a good bet that “Auld Lang Syne” will be part of it.
“It’s how we close out any gathering, really,” Duncan said. “In most Scottish gatherings, you get together at the end of the night in a circle and sing ‘Auld Lang Syne.’ What you normally do is circle up, cross hands and bring the circle in and out. It’s like a big celebration.”
Which brings us to a last point: “Auld Lang Syne” isn’t a sad song. Though the maudlin arrangements most of us know, from year-end parties and ball drops, might suggest otherwise.
“Certainly in this country we’ve made it a melancholy thing,” Duncan said. “But it’s a celebratory song. It’s celebrating times and friends that have been together in the past, and will get together again.”
