Sporran and Shoe Color

[OC Richard]

Spoken like a true Scotsman, “outwith” a preposition almost exclusively used in Scotland.

Or somebody from the USA whose father was a dyed-in-the-wool Anglophile, who grew up using a chaotic mix of British and US spellings, and has been around Scots my whole life.

This stuff has been exacerbated by my wife and I watching English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish, and Australian television almost exclusively, and inevitably picking up words, phrases, pronunciations, etc along the way.

This comes as a complete surprise to someone who always regarded American people as free thinkers never inhibited about doing things their own way. And so to find them unquestioningly following tradition in this way seems contrary to an otherwise national character.

If you knew my father you would understand how being an uninhibited free thinker and unquestionably following tradition could seamlessly coexist.