Dúnadan

After a week of being vaguely tidy and finishing off a few DIY tasks our Visitors from the West arrived this afternoon for a chat, drink, kick-ass meal at Coyaba (still the same menu but still the best pumpkinesque soup and goat curry I've ever had) and miniature photo session. Although Scott and his impressive new beard seem to be able to anticipate the shutterclick at least he doesn't mind getting his picture taken. Sadly he had some sort of chicken thing rather than the goat curry but seemed to enjoy the meal nonetheless. He was Blipcarded recently and still seems to be on the verge of upgrading from Lumix to D40x but hasn't started yet as far as I know.

For the first few times we met (his wife Joanne and the Future Mrs Wingpig were at school together) I would sometimes mumble something at him after which he would asks me what it was I had said as he couldn't make out a word due to my quietness, pitch and accent. Nowadays we seem to understand each other easily enough although occasionally when meeting with Nicky's former schoolpeople one of them will come out with some strange westcoastism I've never heard before. At one point in the evening before heading out to eat (I can't remember the exact path of conversation but we'd got round to the subject of height) I inadvertantly offended Joanne (and apparently everyone else present (except Scott) on her behalf) by referring to her as 'gangly'. Now, where I come from (and also from the context in which I have read it used) this word was offered in the sense of "tall and thin [in both fact but especially impression and appearance]" which is a pretty fair description of a woman who is 5'10½" but who seems even taller and longer-limbed than that, especially when she's sitting down with her arms and legs folded around her or stretched across the entire width of a sofa. It seems that certain Ayrshire-bred people have formed the mistaken impression that gangly means "gawky". Is this a general Scotland-wide opinion of the definition of gangly or gangling? Is it just the school that lot went to which taught them this? More importantly, what other words might I have been innocently employing for the last thirteen years which have been offensively misinterpreted by the local populace?