From A Step So Grave, by Catriona McPherson:

***

[Presenting northmanship--and the islemanship counterploy!]

I have never understood the one-upmanship of Scots regarding longitude [sic*]. Why should the most northerly-dwelling Scotsman in any gathering be the top dog?... I hoped these Rosses would not be the type of Highlanders who would look down on Hugh and Perthshire and thereby nudge him into endless accounts of his grandmother's childhood on Skye to even the score. For northerliness is only one of the winning cards in the game: an island carries a hefty bonus. Of course, Skye is quite a southerly island and the ferry journey to it is a brief one. If a Ross grandmother had come down from some speck in the Shetland Isles, Hugh would be trounced completely.

[*She means latitude, of course.]

***

Then the footman, disappearing out of the room with the empty fish plate, said, "Fuchsia cabin marmoset coal-cake." [This is the English narrator's transcription of how she hears the footman's Gaelic.]

***

"And here comes Lairdie with the lamb."

"Lairdie with the lamb" sounded like another harbinger, along with the coal yak [more mistranscribed Gaelic], but the dining-room door opened just then and the Gaelic-spouting footman backed in, turning to reveal an enormous platter.

***

Hugh, who had never in his life heard a rhetorical question he did not answer

***

"You got here all right through the drifts then?" I said, and was rewarded by his grin lessening from maniacal to merely insufferable.

***

I said nothing and kept my face as blank as a skating pond.

***

Hutcheson was looking at me with his eyebrows positively rippling. They looked like two lively caterpillars crossing a pathway.

***

Alec snorted. He has a marvellous menu of snorts and I had grown to recognise most of them, but this latest was something new.

***

His top lip almost turned itself inside out from the strength of his sneer. [I visualize Kenneth Mars as Hugh Simon!]

***

I caught sight of myself in the dressing-table mirror across the room and closed my mouth, but I could not do anything about my eyebrows. They refused to climb back down my face to where they belonged.

***

"I think a Wester Ross man putting out to sea [on Easter Sunday] would be as conspicuous as you or me walking down Piccadilly stark naked, playing bagpipes."

***

I knew it had distracted me from something more important. I tried to see past it to the back of my own mind.

***

"I shall just take her to Gretna Green and present you with a fait accompli."

"You don't have to go down to Gretna Green if you're already in Scotland," I said.

***

"You could promise now anyway," Donald said. "I'd be most awfully grateful."

I beamed at him. It was a non-committal beam and, besides, the most fervent beam ever hoisted onto a face is not a binding contract.