Building your own house, as you may have learnt, can be quite a fraught experience, but the majority of the agonising has been about what to name it. It all makes me feel rather self-conscious, which is not something a like to think about too often, but not having a street with a numbering system means we have to call it something. Most houses around here seem to be named after birds, flowers etc while the number of fake stone suburban style bungalows named after majestic Scottish mountains is ridiculous. And, yes, there's even a Dunroamin! The new house at the bottom of our drive is prosaically called Birchview, fitting giving its rather restrictive view of a profusion of silver-stemmed trees. So as you'd probably expect, we have gone for something slightly out of the ordinary and, if I say so myself, poetic: Tha Snab. Before you ask, I would see it as a conflation of two definitions from John Jamieson's Scots Dictionary of 1825. Ah the internet - a wonderful resource.
SNAB 1 A shoemaker or cobbler's boy. 2 A cant term for a shoemaker
S To flame as an author our snab was sae bent He ne er blinn da styme till he gat it in prent Pickett's Poems ii 132
SNAB 3 The projecting part of a rock &c
Then knees an elbows like a crab Spraul up yoursel yon dizzy snab A Scott's Poems 1811 p 122 2 This term also denotes the bank rock or hill itself which projects. This has been defined I believe very accurately the brow of a steep ascent. Yon Dizzy Snab will be welcoming visitors soon but the new postbox is now installed ready to receive the usual overwhelming pile of Christmas cards.
May I be the first to congratulate you on a wonderful name and picture, i thought "Tha Snab" was a bit pretentious but "The Snab" is fine. I presume you did a comprehensive google search of all possible acronyms but in case you didnt I did!
ReplyDeleteThe best yet is - The Stichting Noordhollandse Alternatieve Bierbrouwers (SNAB) (which translates as the North Holland Alternative Beer Brewer's Foundation) is a Dutch organisation dedicated to promoting alternative beer and beer culture in The Netherlands - oddly appropriate and may be a chance for you to get some home brew going?
there is also The Swiss National Association of and for the Blind (SNAB) was established in 1903. It is the national umbrella organisation for 60 member organisations, which are all active in the field of blindness. The SNAB endeavours to give partially sighted, blind and deafblind people the opportunity to determine their own way of life.
anyway congrats and may you spend many long happy years at the Snab!
Hope your pronouncing it in an affected Sean Connery style.
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