Caroline Macafee's story about A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue

The book that gave me a lifelong love of scholarship was a dictionary. When I first came across A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (DOST) I was a student at the University of Edinburgh, where it was still being edited and published, one fascicle at a time. On the shelves of the university library, where I often consulted it for essays on the Scots language, only the first three volumes were bound. The senior editor, Jack Aitken, also taught English Language, and that is how it came about that as a mere third year student, I was able to make a contribution to the dictionary.

I found a word. I don't remember now what it was, but it was new to the dictionary. I found it when I was given the task - for a mere undergraduate essay - of transcribing a couple of pages of a manuscript not at that time available in a modern edition. I was sent, with a letter of introduction, to the National Library of Scotland. I felt wonderfully privileged to be allowed in, and even more so when the manuscript that I asked for was brought to me. Later, when I went to collect my marked essay from Jack Aitken, in his office at the dictionary, I was entranced by the scale of the operation, the eident staff, and the banks of pigeon holes full of dictionary slips.

When I learned that my contribution was to be used - at face value, with no further checking by anybody else - I felt a mixture of awe and responsibility that I can only compare to the first time I was allowed to hold a baby. Or to put it another way, for a moment I had been handed the baton of scholarship and allowed to take a step with it.

At this point I should declare an interest. I went on to study the Scots language, research it, and teach it. In the fullness of time, I used the late Jack Aitken's work together with my own in 'A History of Scots to 1700' that forms part of the introduction to DOST.

I had the good fortune to go to university during a Golden Age. The grant was enough to live on during term time, and there was plenty of casual work during vacations. As students, we were taught, even at the lowest levels, by distinguished scholars, and they gave us the sense that the small steps we were taking into the subject were steps on that same road that leads towards mastery. There was never any suggestion that studying was, or should be, a means to any specific end. There were no aims and objectives to tick off. Education, as I experienced it in those wonderful days of the mid 1970s, was simply the opening of the mind to the riches of knowledge, and the disciplining of the mind to systematic enquiry.