Scotch Wut
IT requires (says Sydney Smith) a surgical operation to get a joke well
into a Scotch understanding. Their only idea of wit, or rather that
inferior variety of the electric talent which prevails occasionally in
the North, and which, under the name of Wut, is so infinitely
distressing to people of good taste, is laughing immoderately at stated
intervals. They are so imbued with metaphysics that they even make love
metaphysically. I overheard a young lady of my acquaintance, at a dance
in Edinburgh, exclaim, in a sudden pause of the music, What you say, my
lord, is very true of love in the aibstract, but---- Here the
fiddlers began fiddling furiously, and the rest was lost.