Scottish word of the day: Agley

Published on 09/08/2012 14:53

Pronounced to rhyme with affray, the literal meaning of Scots word agley is ‘askew’ or ‘squint’ (in its adjectival form).

However, it is most often used figuratively to mean ‘gone awry’, as in its earliest recorded and still most notable usage; by Robert Burns in his 1785 poem To a Mouse

The line ‘The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley’ provided the inspiration for the tile of John Steinbeck’s 1937 novel Of Mice and Men

But the word has been adopted by writers closer to home too, including humorist P.G. Wodehouse, who had his quintessentially English protagonist Bertie Wooster utter lines including: ‘Reasoning closely, I deduced that her interview with LP Runkle must have gone awry or, as I much prefer to put it, agley’, from Much Obliged, Jeeves.