‘I don’t mind when a Scotsman says it,’ remarked my husband magnanimously. The ethnically sensitive word in question was outwith.
The Stornoway Gazette announced in 1998: ‘On Christmas Day and outwith these hours, arrangements to have urgent prescriptions dispensed may be made by ’phoning 701472.’ I like the apostrophe in ’phoning. Short for telephoning, as ’bus is for omnibus.
Good writers use outwith. ‘He’d wanted to buy a place there, but it had been too isolated for his wife – and outwith their means anyway,’ wrote Ian Rankin in Dead Souls (1999). There it means ‘beyond’, as in a discussion in the Daily Star, by a real referee, of Connor Goldson’s treatment last month by a Video Assistant Referee on the matter of handball: ‘It looks as if it’s going to hit his head, so he’s not making his body unnaturally bigger.
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