June 21, 2006, 5:56 p.m. (Message 45614, in reply to message 45604)
In any case, I've seen "outwith" occasionally, and just considered it a rare synonym for "outside". I think I'd picked up that it had some UK association, but didn't think of it as especially Scottish. I'm a bit surprised that, in this day of such easy international communication, there are English-speaking people who don't know the word. We do have a minor problem in English, in that the opposite of "within" obviously should be "without", but that's taken for a rather different meaning. That's typical for such a poorly designed language, I guess. -- _, O John Chambers <:#/> <xx@xxxxxxxx.xxx.xxx> + <xxxxxx@xxxxx.xxx> /#\ in Waltham, Massachusetts, USA, Earth | | ' ` In the old "English" hymnbook the first verse of the Easter Hymn was There is a green hill far away "Without" a city wall It did not mean that the city had no wall but rather that the hill was outside the city's wall. It has now been changed to "Outside" So both "outwith" and "without" can mean "outside" Simon Vancouver