Page 5 - Art First: Helen MacAlister: The Glamour of Backwardness

AF HM catalogue 2023 PRINT.qxp_Layout 1 15/06/2023 17:35 Page 3

bonie ; hinny

2012, sand-blasted English Muffle glass panel, diptych,
each panel 10.5 x 14.8 cm (a6) , edition of 2

‘The Scots language is riddled with reductive terms and diminutives’. 1

‘In so far as, in present-day Scotland, English language and English identity are
intrusive and threaten to supplant, in the short or the long term, the existing
culture, they will do this by denying any effective difference between themselves
and what they replace, by claiming that the distinction between Scottishness and
Englishness is insignificant, or alternatively that Scottishness is a subset of English -
ness. (The success of such strategies is evident in the way, until recently, the Scots
language could still be represented as a form of English, a dialect of the intrusive
language and therefore, according to current (mistaken) usage, a derivative and
2
distorted form of it.)’

These two statements are both attended to in the example of bonie ; hinny.
Concise endearments.

1. Robert Crawford, ed., Robert Burns & Cultural Authority, p.79 (Douglas Dunn), University of Iowa Press, 1997.

2. Derick Thomson, ed., Gaelic and Scots in Harmony, p130, Christopher Whyte, ‘George Campbell Hay:
Nationalism with a difference’, Univeristy of Glasgow, 1990.