Word of the week: Mingin' | The Guardian

I have mused before about the effects of importing foreign words into English sentences: French flair, German exactitude, the eternal verity of Latin. This week viewers of BBC's Match of the Day heard an example of what Scots can do to illuminate an otherwise standard sentence of standard English. Deeply expressive, foreign to most of us, even though it does not exactly come from a foreign language, the word was "mingin'" (with a hard "g").

The speaker was Graeme Souness, Scottish manager of Blackburn Rovers, interviewed after his team had been knocked out of the FA Cup by another deeply mediocre side, Middlesbrough. The result, 1-0, had been influenced by the sending off of a Blackburn defender after what appeared an accidental collision with a Middlesbrough forward. Souness, not renowned for a sunny nature, was still dark with rage at the referee (he had earlier been pictured shouting at him as a policeman ushered him from the pitch). "I thought that Mr Barber had a mingin' game," he declared.

Cue much amusement in the BBC studio. "What did you think?" Gary Lineker asked his resident experts. "Pretty mingin'?" Mark Lawrenson agreed that the referee's decision was definitely "Mingin'". Alan Hansen, like Souness a Scot who had played for Liverpool, remarked wryly that Souness had "mellowed so much". "When he said 'Mingin' ' at Liverpool, the facial muscles used to go..." Hansen grimaced for the camera. If you learned your footy with Liverpool in the tough old days, "you knew what 'Mingin" meant," he added.

But what did it mean? We presumed that Hansen knew, and perhaps that Lineker and Lawrenson were schooled in Scots colloquialisms in the days when top English teams were full of hard, ambitious Scotsmen rather than Frenchman and Scandinavians. In fact, "Mingin'" means "evil-smelling". Dictionaries of slang detect the word from the 1970s, but James Stevenson's invaluable Scoor-Oot ("A Dictionary of Scots Words and Phrases") finds "ming" for "smell" from the early 20th century. "Mingin'" can also mean "exceedingly drunk". Stevenson does not record that "minger" was 1990s adolescent slang for an unattractive woman.

"The ref had a stinker" sounds positively genteel. "Mingin'" is tougher talk. The word seemed so much more expressive coming from someone who, as a player, had been a rare combination of finesse and brutality and, as a manager, is both quietly spoken and somewhat threatening. "Mingin'" was the verbal glint of his studs - the hint of a tough life before the tailored suits. We need only some more equally poetic words of Scots to catch his state of mind. He was probably trauchled. Certainly he was scunnered with the referee. No wonder he needed a good girn.

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