My daughter gets married today and so this word has been on my mind. 

She wants a traditional day and George Penny's Traditions of Perth (1836) tells of “the three different kinds of Weddings: ...“a free wedding, to which only a few select friends were invited, and where the guests were not allowed to be at any expence. 

The dinner wedding, where the dinner was provided by the marriage party, the company paying for the drink and the fiddler; and the penny wedding”. This last seems inadvisable if Anna Blair's description in The Rowan on the Ridge (1980) is anything to go by: “the guests who brought their ‘penny' in meat and drink to furnish the marriage table were still sprawled under it halfway into the next Sabbath”.

 We do, however, intend to indulge in “promiscuous dancing” in which men dance with women. This was “a thing condemned by the people of God as no honest recreation, at least when in companies that are mixed, and (as we call it) promiscous dancing, such as useth to be at marriages” according to J. Durham's The law unsealed or, a practical exposition of the ten commandments (a1658). 

There was never any objection to good conversation and perhaps we will help the next generation to share the experience described by Sheena Blackhall in Wittgenstein's Web (1996) “I didna learn Doric frae a buikie. I learned it frae ma bluid kin, at kistins, at waddins, at wark an at play”. 

On a more serious note, one of the earliest Scots references (and my husband might say one of the truest) comes from John Barbour in the late 14^th century: “That wedding is the hardest band That ony man may tak on hand”, but, then, as the Fergusson proverb goes, “A man may wooe where he will, but hee will wed where his hap is”.

Scots Word of the Week is written by Chris Robinson of Scottish Language Dictionaries.

This week's Word is spoken by Dr Dauvit Horsbroch.