We’ve left London and headed north, and are now guests of a Scot and an Orcadian. At breakfast today they used a word that is even odder to my ear than widdershins. They referred to the pigeons outside as “gormless”.

They say it means “stupid/brainless”. The word as used here also has the intriguing feature of being used only in the negative, i.e., No one speaks of “gorm” just “gormless”. This recalls P.G. Wodehouse describing a character as “If not disgruntled, neither was he entirely gruntled”.