A Glasgow friend has sent me some rather interesting words used in his city, and not found elsewhere a far as he knows. The first one is ballop .

This is not really a native of Glasgow, I'm told, but drifted in there from Galloway and other places to the south. A ballop is the fly on a pair of pants. In other areas, notably Perthshire, it is known as the spaiver . Two interesting words. Ballop is wittily described in MacTaggart's Gallovidian Encyclopedia of 1824 as "The shop door in a man's nether clothing."

The word is found also in Old Scots in the 16th century. Cf. Old Scots baglap , id., also the name of a dance mentioned in the Complaynt of Scotlande in 1549.

Spaiver is also found as spaver, spever and spawer . P Buchan's Secret Songs from north-Eastern Scotland, published in 1832, has the line: "But the auld sow thrust her grunt In the spever o' his breeks."

An extended variant of spare , noun, from Middle English and early modern English spaier found in Cursor Mundi about 1300, spayre from around1400, spayere from c.1430, spayre from around1529, an opening in a woman's gown or petticoat. "He put his hand in at hir spair, And graipit dounwart'; 'That . . . quene, with one tres of hir hair knitt wpp when that the other hang evin sparpled to hir spair;' 'And that part of weemens claiths, sik as of their gown, or petticot, quhilk vnder the belt, and before, is open, commonlie is called, the spare', all three quotes are from the 16th century.

My second word is bampot , emphasis on the first syllable. This is a Glasgow term for a foolish, stupid person of either sex, as are the words bam and bamstick . Bampot has found its way into modern Scottish literature. Alex Cathcart's The Comeback published in Glasgow in 1986, has "I think your old mate Peter Ray is doin his Captain Marvel act on the skip."

"F**k. He's a real bampot." And that splendid writer, A L Kennedy, in her Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains (1990) has: "Equally, I might get five thousand for one syphilitic bampot whose only real achievement was a speedy and popular death."

Bampot is thought to be from barm, the froth found on the top of a fermenting liquid, which is also the source of the English colloquial word barmy , meaning crazy.

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