A quiet notice V2Melody closes at midnight on , Spanish time.

Closes

A note from Richard

V2Melody will close at midnight on 20 January 2028

This site has been a retirement project in musical poetry: poems chosen with care and set to music, offered freely for as long as it felt right to keep the garden open.

The work no longer holds the place it once did in my life. I have gone as far with it as I wish to go. Like a sand mandala, it was made to be completed and then released. I am not attached to its permanence, and I do not believe any of it needs to last beyond the time it was given. The poems were already here before I arrived and began to experiment with them. They will still be here when these musical experiments, and indeed myself, have been swept away, like the sand of a mandala. Nothing has been lost.

I want a simpler end to my life, days of simple love and enjoyment with my wonderful wife of 20 years. The work of maintaining a server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit that life.

From 4 November 2026 I will not be adding new poems or musical poems to the site.

The experimental music I am making now is on my Suno profile. Those pieces stay there, and are not added to this site.

Until midnight on 20 January 2028, Spanish time, everything remains available exactly as it is. That is when my VPS server contract comes to an end, and it will not be renewed. After that, the server will be switched off and the site will disappear.

The Mandala Is Finished explains this more fully.

Thank you to anyone who found a poem, a track, or a quiet moment here.

The pleasure was in the making.

Richard

Home › Glossary › Letter S

Scunner

Dialect
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A strong feeling of disgust or aversion; to be filled with revulsion or intense dislike.

Detailed Definition
"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.
Example
Example in poetry:
"Scunner" means a strong feeling of disgust or loathing, or to feel disgust; A poet might write: "The scunner rose within his throat / at every false and gilded vote." applies disgust to political satire; "She felt a scunner at the lie — / the kind that makes ye want tae cry." connects disgust and grief; "The scunner of the endless grey — / she packed her things and moved away." uses the term to motivate departure; "Even the good feel scunner's bite / at all the world has wrong and trite." validates moral disgust; "Scunner can be wisdom's start — / it clears the rubbish from the heart." rehabilitates the feeling as discernment
Additional Notes
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.
Also Known As
Disgust Aversion Loathing
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