• Reading age: 18

There are many good and useful books that provide a wide range of Scottish Gaelic vocabulary to express many aspects of daily life – except, for the most part, the topics covered in this book.

Scottish Highlanders, and their descendants all over the world, are no better and no worse than any other people where “sinful” behaviour is concerned. Standards of morality and social conventions changed dramatically during the 19th century – and most of the people engaged in recording and commenting upon Highland life and tradition were puritanical ministers and priests who left out the racy bits. So, while there are many useful books that provide a wide range of Scottish Gaelic vocabulary to express many aspects of daily life – for the most part, they leave out the naughty bits.

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Michael Newton, PhD, is Technical Lead for the Carolina Digital Humanities Initiative (see http://digitalinnovation.unc.edu). He was formerly an Assistant Professor in the Celtic Studies Department of St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia. He was awarded a PhD in Celtic Studies from the University of Edinburgh in 1998. He has written several books and numerous articles on many aspects of Highland tradition and history in Scotland and North America. He was the editor of Celts in the Americas (CBU Press) and Dùthchas nan Gaidheal: Selected Essays of John MacInnes, which won the Saltire Society’s Research Book award of 2006, and is the author of Warriors of the Word: The World of the Scottish Highlanders, which was nominated for the 2009 Katharine Briggs Award for folklore research. You can follow his work on his blog, The Virtual Gael, at http://virtualgael.wordpress.com/.