"Lug" is the plain Scots word for ear, and its bluntness makes it a favourite for comic and realistic verse. Burns uses "lug" and related expressions ("by the lug") with characteristic earthiness, and the word appears in contexts of listening, overhearing, and the social surveillance that characterises close communities. The lug is the organ of community gossip and secret knowledge, and in poetry it represents the ways in which private speech enters public knowledge. The word's blunt, comic quality also makes it a vehicle for physical humour and social observation in Scots verse.

Lug is a earthy, unsentimental word for the ear, with none of the delicacy of its English counterpart. Its roughness is part of its expressiveness: to have something "dinnled in yer lug" (rung in your ear) or to "lend an lug" (lend an ear) is to participate in communication with your whole, physical, unglamorous body. In flyting and satirical verse, "lugs" are the organs that must hear unpleasant truths — they are boxed, pulled, assaulted with words. The word's physicality places communication firmly in the body rather than the mind. For students, tracking the use of "lug" in a poem reveals something about the poet's attitude to listening: is it voluntary, coerced, reluctant, or eager?