Word: scottishly
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Some 300 years after a wandering Scottish mystic called "the Brahan Seer" made that Delphic statement, it is turning out to be almost literally true. The "black rain " is about to fall from a vast array of oil rigs in the North Sea. Not coincidentally, the country is undergoing the first widespread resurgence of nationalism in this century. One indicator of the new mood was the dramatic breakthrough scored in February's British elections by the Scottish National Party, a modest fringe group for most of its 40-year history. Claiming, among other things, that "it's Scotland...
...case for greater autonomy is gaining surprising strength. It is built upon both a Scottish sense of uniqueness and a fear that if affairs are left to drift, Scotland will be in deep trouble. Fishermen worry that with Britain's membership in the Common Market, they will be powerless to prevent incursions from European fleets. Residents of towns touched by the offshore oil boom are anxious about the soaring inflation brought on by, among other things, sudden prosperity, population growth and shortages of housing and services...
Greater Glory. The greatest obstacles to Scottish independence in the past have come from the Scots' own jaundiced view of themselves, as plain and prickly as the thistle, the Scots' emblem. For centuries they have resented their position as a nation of 5 million people with its own language, democratic tradition and legal system, but without so much as a single self-governing political body. "We have an entire nation that has been submerged into believing it is inferior," says Author Robert Shirley, 46, of Edinburgh's Heriot-Watt University. Recalls Hugh MacDiarmid, the country...
...clamor for control-or at least a big share-of North Sea reserves was accompanied by a rising sense of cultural pride as, in the words of Scots Folklorist Hamish Henderson, "a civilization claws itself back to life." The blue and white Scottish flag is increasingly flown. The Drybrough brewery prints the flag on its export cans, while the brewer of Tennent's lager pushes the slogan: "It's good ... It's satisfying ... It's Scottish." Scots revel in the fact that the country's soccer team qualified for the World Cup final this year...
Other sorts of trouble are coming to paradise, it appears. Those magical Scottish names, the cleek, and the spoon, the baffy and of course that old standby the mashie niblick, says Wodehouse, are about to become as rare-not to say mythological-as Scottish golfing champions themselves. It is rumored that golf is less "a thing of the spirit" than it once was. Given such commercial-calamitous times, golfers and nongolfers alike must swiftly turn for solace to The Oldest Member. Who better than Wodehouse can guard against creeping greed and gallopping solemnity, on the page or on the fairway...