American sergeant pulls on rubber gloves.
The Scottish Word:

Graip.

“Welcome – this is yir jile and I’m yer jiler for the-day – noo get ben the hoose and assume the position for tae be graiped.”

Translate:

graip: search with the hands, probe, examine.

“Welcome – this is your jail and I am your jailer for today – now proceed through the facility and assume the position for a cavity search.”

[graip spelled out in the phonetic alphabet.]

Illustration Friday. frozen.

The Scottish Word: graip with its definition and its meaning illustrated and captioned with the word used in context in the Scots language and in English.

4 thoughts on “Graip.

  1. I don’t know about the other meaning (maybe
    It should be “grope”? ) but in the ’70s I was told by a farming lady from northeast Scotland that they used to call a garden fork a graip.

    1. You’re right – my dad had neep graips that have at least 16 tangs each with a little sphere on the end so they didn’t stab the vegetable as well as gravel graipes without the nobs on the end for his work on the railway tracks. But Burns also uses it as grope on his poem on lawyers.
      “His argument he tint it:
      He gaiped for ‘t, he graiped for ‘t,
      He fand it was awa, man;
      But what his common sense came short,
      He eke’d out wi law, man.” Robert Burns.
      https://stooryduster.co.uk/scottish-word/tint/

  2. this definition is a load of bull* and is just an excuse for a cheap laugh.
    a quick look at a million hits on Google will provide the definition as used daily by my both my grandfathers and their fathers before them.

    1. Aye there is another meaning.

      And the site is for laughs.

      But;

      I’ll not rely on the Internet ‘voting’ on the correct ’thing’ on anything. It’s full of everybody and their bairns with most parking their brains well away from the keyboard.

      I’d take your argument up with Robert Burns who uses this meaning in his poem composed in 1787 after a visit to the Court of Session in order to hear the case of Campbell v. Montgomerie where the advocate Campbell was a capable figure in law and Erskine tended to go for rhetoric and a quick wit as ripost.

      The excerpt of the first verse I quote (which I use on the stooryduster site here) is the argument of law from Campbell. The second verse if you care to seek it out is where Erskine is about to whip up the jury and court into a storm with the intention to win on his rhetoric.

      And you can also argue with the Scottish National Dictionary which gives one of the definition as the same as Burns used with their usual back up of written sources as examples.

      And I’ve physically worked with gravel grapes (pointy) as used on the railway by my dad and neep grapes (nobs on the end) to feed the turnip slicer as handed to me by granny using me as child labour on the farm.

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