Sots and Nitters

From a thread in Bounties:

Children with a tendency to mispronounce and a family that picks up the quirky result

Can’t resist mentioning that the first person main protagonist in my novel, Birgom’s Diary, who is also an important minor figure in Exile and in the new novel I’m working on at the moment, got his name like that. His given name is Gordon, but his big sister, just a year older, called him Gom, and it stuck. (Their surname is Beer, but in later life he lives in a place where they put family names first, hence Beer Gom, or Birgom.)

One parent came from Baltimore ¹, the other from Glasgow ², so it’s probably a miracle that I can speak English at all. 😂

¹ Balmer, Merlin, Yew-nigh-dead staytz (seriously, there’s no ‘t’ or ‘o’ in Baltimore and it’s not a three syllable word).

² Glazgee? He wasn’t much of a figure in my life so stuff like Rab C Nesbitt and Haggis are “incomprehensible gibberish”.

Glazgee?

Glasgae… but yes, as long as that second G’s a hard G not jee, you’ve hit the pronunciation. Or maybe somewhere between that and Glazgay, but the AY is shorter than that looks. As for Balimr, I’ve no idea, whereas presumably you have.

As for Sots and Nitters – I think I’d have included the K on Knitters, giving as it does an image of an elderly couple in their armchairs – with their (great?) grandchildren opening unappreciated Christmas presents on the floor between them and a roaring fire.