{"id":10594,"date":"2014-10-21T15:10:19","date_gmt":"2014-10-21T14:10:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/?p=10594"},"modified":"2014-10-21T15:10:19","modified_gmt":"2014-10-21T14:10:19","slug":"agley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=10594","title":{"rendered":"Agley"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I came across the interesting word <strong>agley<\/strong> today when looking up something else in a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nciku.com\/search\/zh\/detail\/%E9%94%99\/6726\">Chinese dictionary<\/a> &#8211; the Chinese equivalent is \u9519 [\u932f] (cu\u00f2). It is a Scots word, pronounced [\u0259\u02c8gli\/\u0259\u02c8gl\u0259i], that means &#8220;off the straight, awry, oblique, wrong&#8221;. It comes from the word <em>gley<\/em> (to squint), according to <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wiktionary.org\/wiki\/agley\">Wiktionary<\/a>, which is possible related to the Icelandic word <em>glj\u00e1<\/em> (to glitter) [<a href=\"http:\/\/www.finedictionary.com\/Gleyed.html\">source<\/a>].<\/p>\n<p>It appears in the Robert Burns poem &#8220;To a Mouse&#8221;: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The best-laid schemes o&#8217; mice an&#8217; men<br \/>\nGang aft agley,<br \/>\nAn&#8217; lea&#8217;e us nought but grief an&#8217; pain,<br \/>\nFor promis&#8217;d joy!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This poem was the only place I&#8217;d heard it before, so it was quite a surprise to come across it in a Chinese-English dictionary. Have you heard or seen it used elsewhere?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I came across the interesting word agley today when looking up something else in a Chinese dictionary &#8211; the Chinese equivalent is \u9519 [\u932f] (cu\u00f2). It is a Scots word, pronounced [\u0259\u02c8gli\/\u0259\u02c8gl\u0259i], that means &#8220;off the straight, awry, oblique, wrong&#8221;. It comes from the word gley (to squint), according to Wiktionary, which is possible related [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,107,10,55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-etymology","category-language","category-scots"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10594"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10594\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}