"Scunner" is one of the most viscerally expressive words in Scots, naming a disgust that is physical as much as moral — the actual, embodied sensation of revulsion. It appears in poems of social satire, personal displeasure, and comic complaint, and it carries the Scots capacity for strong feeling expressed directly and without apology. Burns and later poets deploy "scunner" with relish, and MacDiarmid elevates it to a near-philosophical condition of alienation from the unsatisfactory world. The word's sound — that initial "sc" — has the quality of something being scraped away in disgust.

Scunner is one of the most expressive disgust-words in any dialect — the physical reality of revulsion is built into the word's very sound, that hard initial consonant followed by the dark vowel. To be "scunnered" is to be completely put off, deeply revolted, unable to continue with whatever has caused the feeling. In contemporary Scottish usage it is also commonly used for simple boredom or fed-upness — "scunnered wi' it a'" — but in verse the more intense sense of genuine revulsion tends to dominate. The word can refer to a specific cause (a "scunner" is also the thing that disgusts) as well as the feeling itself. Students should note its range from mild annoyance to profound revulsion.