How to tell if you're Scottish

Geoff-- a software engineer, amateur linguist, conlang creator, and part-time hacker-- lives in Edinburgh with his web pages, and has taken the time to instruct Sassenachs, Yanks, and other far-flung tribes on the essences, or at least the accidences, of being Scottish.
--Mark

• You're familiar with Ewen MacGregor, Mel Gibson, Jim White, Oor Wullie, Dougie Donnelly, Billy Connolly, Archie McPherson, Grandpa Broon, Gavin Hastings, Robbie Coltraine, Rab C. Nesbitt, High Road, Bill Paterson, The Krankies, Robert Carlyle, and (if you're younger) Skoosh.
• You know at least the basics of football (it's never called "soccer"), and probably rugby too. If you're male, you probably know the rules of football in great detail and can name the eleven players who should make up the national team; additionally, you can probably come up with convincing arguments why none of them should be (depending on your religion) Tims or Huns. You prefer not to remember Costa Rica in 1990, or Peru or Iran in 1978, although you reminisce fondly about Archie Gemmill's goal against Holland.
• American football is still something of a novelty which you can see at strange times of the day, and cricket is for Sassenachs (except in Freuchie). Shinty, by contrast, is a genuine Scottish sport popular in the Highlands, and you may have played it at school.
• You are probably allowed four or five weeks of holiday a year, and your boss is equally probably allowed to ask you not to take it all.
• You consider a few hours of sunshine to be an event worthy of note or even celebration. You cheerfully put up with cold and wet weather which would frighten most people from warmer climes.
• It snows every winter, yet nobody in positions of authority ever seems to expect it, and there is consequently some disruption to essential services.

• You probably believe in God, and if so are probably a Catholic, Protestant or Wee Free; although you probably don't go to church very often. You're very careful about religion in parts of the West Coast.
• You think of McDonald's, Burger King, KFC, Chinese takeaways and so on as cheap food, but a perfectly acceptable excuse for not cooking.
• You probably own at least one telephone and at least one TV, often as a combined deal with a cable or satellite company. Your place is heated in the winter and has its own bathroom, which has a bath or shower and certainly a toilet. You do your washing in a machine or the local launderette. You don't have a dirt floor. You probably eat at a table, sitting on chairs; if not, you eat on chairs in front of the TV.
• You don't consider insects, dogs, cats, monkeys, horses, or guinea pigs to be food, and you certainly don't kill your own food.
• The proliferation of utility and transport companies is confusing, since they all promise to offer the best and cheapest services, yet nothing actually seems better than the simpler times before everything was deregulated.
• You expect, as a matter of course, that the phones will work. Getting a new phone is routine, but expensive if you're with BT.
• The train system is a joke, unless you live in Glasgow; you prefer to travel in your car, even if you have to sit in traffic jams for longer than the duration of the equivalent train journey.
• You are used to two large political parties (Labour and the Tories), two small ones (SNP and the LibDems), and some tiny ones (including the Greens and the SSP) but the main battle is between Labour and the SNP. You probably think that the SNP speaks best for Scotland and are unlikely to take the Tories seriously, especially since the poll tax debacle. This system is much better than, for example, the American system, which consists of two identical parties.
• You probably voted "Yes, Yes" in the Referendum, but like to complain about the results as though it were all someone else's fault which you had no part in.
• Socialism is a fine and noble political theory with a long Scottish tradition, although since John Smith died the only proper socialist party is now Tommy Sheridan's SSP. Communism is taking it a bit far though.
• If you're male and urban, you sometimes wear the kilt in public, and you may have worn it at your wedding.
• Most people are white, although they can also be yellow, brown or black. It doesn't really matter most of the time anyway, since you're familiar with people of Asian extraction from your local newsagent or corner shop.
• You think most problems could be solved if only people would put aside their prejudices and work together.
• You would like to think of the legal system as strong and just, but know that it often isn't. You know that if you went into business and had problems with a customer, partner, or supplier, you could take them to court.

• You rarely need to bother with foreign languages, but were probably taught a bit of French or German in school. If you have the Gaelic, it's for nationalistic reasons if you don't come from the Hebrides, or for practical reasons if you do.
• Words like "both", "home" and "stone" are pronounced "baith", "hame" and "stane", despite the spelling. "Wednesday" has three syllables, and "food" rhymes with "good"; the second syllable of "situation" is "yee", not "yoo". "House" is pronounced "hoose".
• A stream is a "burn", a valley is a "glen", and to "greet" does not mean to welcome. You refer to the Scottish weather as "dreich", and get annoyed at people (especially Sassenachs) who can't say "loch" properly.
• You probably believe that higher taxes are necessary to fund better public services, but aren't too keen to actually pay them.
• School is free up to P7, although the better-off prefer to send their children to public schools; from there on you expect to have to pay to get a decent education. If you stay on beyond S4, you expect do Highers in S5 and normally CSYS in S6 before going on to University.
• University degrees are four years long, except for longer courses like medicine and dentistry.
• Mustard comes in jars or yellow tin boxes, and sometimes in stone pots. Milk comes in plastic bottles or in cardboard cartons decorated with black-and-white abstract cow-like designs, and the lettering is colour-coded so that you know how much fat is inside.
• The month comes second: 24/6/1314 and 12/9/1997. (And you know what happened on those dates.)
• The decimal point is a dot, certainly not a comma.
• A billion is either a thousand times or a million times a million - you're not sure which.
• The "second city of the Empire" was Glasgow, not Birmingham or anywhere else in England.
• You expect marriages to be made for love, not arranged by third parties. Many marriages happen in church, some in registry offices. You have a best man and a maid or matron of honor at the wedding-- a friend or a sibling. And, naturally, a man gets only one wife at a time.
• If a man has sex with another man, he's a homosexual.
• Once you're introduced to someone, you can usually call them by their first name.
• If you're a woman, you might go to the beach topless on holiday, but never at home.
• A hotel room has a private bath if you pay extra for it.
• You'd rather a film be subtitled than dubbed (if you go to foreign films at all).
• You seriously expect to be able to transact business, or deal with the government, without paying bribes, although your competitors seem to get away with it sometimes.
• If a politican has been cheating on his wife, you would question his ability to govern.
• Many stores will take one or more of your credit cards.
• A company can fire just about anybody it wants. You'd prefer if it were otherwise, since you probably know several people who've been made redundant my large multinationals who take advantage of the fact that Britain's employment laws are laxer than those in Europe.
• Labour Day, spelt correctly with the "u", is on the first of May.

• You've probably seen Braveheart and Trainspotting, and maybe Local Hero, Gregory's Girl, and that one about the two teenage boys who rob coaches from a motorbike (update: it was called Restless Natives). Most of the films you've seen have been American.
• You know some or all of The Corries, Andy Stewart, Lulu, Alex Harvey, RunRig, Simple Minds, Big Country, Dougie MacLean, Wet Wet Wet, Deacon Blue, Del Amitri, Goodbye Mr. Mackenzie, and Travis. You probably don't want to admit to knowing where "fandabidozi" originally came from.
• You can only expect good medical treatment if you can afford to go private, otherwise you usually have to wait ages for trivial operations.
• The history you were taught in school consisted of, in decreasing proportions, Scottish, British and European.
• You expect the army to fight wars, not get involved in politics.

• Your country has never been conquered by a foreign nation, but it's been ruled by one particular one for long periods of time...
• You're used to a wide variety of choices for most things you'd want to buy.
• There are five terrestrial TV channels, three of which have some special Scottish programmes.
• You measure things in feet, pounds, and gallons if you're over a certain age; otherwise you're likely to use metric. You measure distances to nearby towns in miles.
• Comics come in three varieties: cartoon strips such as the inimitable Oor Wullie in the Sunday Post; cheaply printed children's publications like The Beano, and glossy hardbound albums (mostly American imports) like Batman.
• The people who appear on the most popular talk shows are usually entertainers or politicians, and occasionally authors or film stars with a new book or film to plug.
• You drive on the left side of the road. You stop at red lights even if nobody's around, and often have to stop at green lights too. If you're a pedestrian and cars are stopped at a red light, you will fearlessly cross the street in front of them - except in Glasgow, when the colour of the lights is of no importance.
• You have some good friends who are English, and have gone there a few times on holiday, but in general you'd rather England were a friendly neighbour than a domineering landlord. You think the English attitude to Europe is a long-out-of-date relic of the days of Empire.
• You consider the Volkswagen Beetle to be a small car.
• The police are not armed.
• If a woman is plumper than the average, it doesn't make much difference either way to her looks.
• The biggest meal of the day is in the evening, usually at or not long after five pm if you're at school, and a bit later if you work.
• The nationality people most often make jokes about is the English. You probably don't make jokes about the Irish - only the English do that.
• There's parts of the city you'd certainly never go at night unless you have a trusted local with you.

• You feel that your kind of people aren't being listened to enough in Westminster-- or Holyrood.
• You wouldn't expect both inflation and unemployment to be very high (say, over 15%) at the same time.
• The family someone comes from, and in Edinburgh the school they went to, matters a lot in some circumstances, although you feel it shouldn't.
• You think of opera and ballet as elite entertainments. It's likely you don't see that many plays, either.
• Christmas is in the winter. You spend it with your family, give presents, put up a tree, and wonder why it almost never actually snows.
• You might be able to name the capitals or the leaders of some of the nations of Europe, but probably not all.
• You've left a message at the beep, or voicemail.
• Taxis are probably too expensive, but they get you there quicker than trains.
• You probably believe in welfare and unemployment payments to those who can't live without. You probably also believe that too many people get them who could very well do without.
• If you want to be a doctor, you need to get a bachelor's first.
• Buying a house is safer than in England, since gazumping isn't done here; but you have to pay for several surveys.
• There sure are a lot of lawyers.

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