Can I tell a little story here? It is a true story although I have changed it slightly. Once upon a time there was a lodge belonging to an elderly lady and each year a select and favoured group of acquaintances were invited to join her there and enjoy her hospitality. When the old lady eventually departed this life her family had no objections, whatsoever, about others enjoying the facility. The acquaintances and other “hangers-on” were deeply upset and raised objections, however, that any outsider should ever be able to make use of what was once their exclusive domain.
What this analogy is trying to highlight is the “dog in a manger” attitude some seem to have about tartans as theirs and theirs alone. The entrenched prejudice about anyone not “entitled” having the temerity to wear a jealously guarded tartan and, by so doing, somehow infringing their exclusive right to it. How often we see this and it must be a deep-seated trait in human personality to want to retain as an exclusive possession something even so trivial as a piece of cloth made in a particular pattern, for that is all it is, no more and no less.