BUMBAZE, v.

Dictionaries of the Scots Language defines bumbaze simply:

“to perplex, bewilder, stupefy”.

An early example comes from William Hamilton of Gilbertfield in his The History of William Wallace (1722):

“The Siege thus rais’d in Hurry and great Fray, The bumbaz’d Suthron [English] scamp’red all away”.

Turning from war, George Smith’s 1824 Douglas Travestie and Miscellaneous Pieces described its opposite:

“Love is a fashious thing, how it bombazes A’ the daft gouks wha it gets in its power.”

The following century, a Scotsman article covering the newly published (1993) New Testament in Scots cited this passage:

“[the crowd] war fair bumbazed, ilkane o them, tae hear the Apostles speakin in his ain leid.”

However, a letter also published in 1993 in the Scotsman deplored a legal decision involving a young man using Scots in a court of law:

“I wis baith bumbazed and scunnert tae read this morn that a shirra had dung doon a chiel for saying, ‘Aye’. The minstrel shirra himself (Sir Wattie Scott) will be fair birlin in his graff; aye, he will an a.”

Stuart A. Paterson’s poem Here’s the Weather (2017) gives us this usage:

“Fae stooshie tae fankle tae bouroch tae dreck / we’re steeped in the downpour of dialect / which foosts & bumbazes & shoogles & heezes, / skites, dights, invites us, unites us & frees us.”

More recently, in Scotland’s Linguistic Launscape (2022), Ashley Douglas addressed:

“The relationship atween Scots and Gaelic…” as “anither aspeck o the rowth o Scotland’s linguistic launscape that can lea fowk a wee bit bumbazed.”

This Scots Word of the Week comes from Dictionaries of the Scots Language.

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