89 Scottish Memes That Prove Sarcasm Might As Well Be A National Language

Scotland picked the unicorn as its national animal back when its kings were still deciding what to put on their royal coat of arms. In Scottish legend, the unicorn was so powerful that it was considered dangerous, which is why heraldic unicorns are usually drawn in chains.

When James VI of Scotland became James I of England in 1603, the unicorn replaced the Welsh dragon on the royal arms, where it still stands next to the English lion. A country that picks a mythical beast as its mascot was never going to have a boring sense of humor.

The national drink is just as unlikely. Irn-Bru was first sold in 1901 as "Iron Brew" by the Barr family, and it was renamed in 1946 because new labeling rules said a drink couldn't call itself "brew" if nothing had been brewed. It has been one of the best-selling soft drinks in Scotland for decades, often outselling Coca-Cola. Its old advertising slogan was "Made in Scotland from girders," which is the sort of joke only a Scottish company could get away with.

Plenty of the memes in this collection are about the weather, because nobody has more material. Parts of the western Highlands get more than 3,000 millimeters of rain a year, roughly ten feet. Scots has a word for fine misty rain, smirr, and another for a downpour so heavy it bounces off the pavement, stoating. Then there's dreich, which covers anything dull, damp, and grey, and describes an average day up north.

Scots is also its own language, and plenty of Scots speak it. In the 2011 census, more than 1.5 million people in Scotland said they could speak Scots, and the UK government formally recognized it as a language back in 2001. That explains why the memes keep sneaking in words that look like typos and aren't. Patter, the word from the page's name, means chat, and having good patter means you can talk your way through anything, preferably while insulting someone you like.

Outsiders have trouble with the accent, and Scottish comedians have been milking this for years. In 2010, the sketch show Burnistoun released a skit about a voice-recognition elevator that can't understand two Scottish men asking for the eleventh floor. The clip went viral and has racked up millions of views, mostly from people who have been through the exact same thing with a phone assistant.

Glasgow has its own running joke, which stands outside the Gallery of Modern Art. Someone put a traffic cone on the head of the Duke of Wellington statue in the early 1980s, and it has been getting replaced ever since. The council reportedly spent thousands of pounds a year removing the cones. In 2013, it planned to raise the statue's plinth to put the cone out of reach, and the public outcry was loud enough that the plan was dropped. The cone stayed, and it is now one of the city's most photographed landmarks.

Food is the other big source of memes. Every January 25, Scots celebrate the birthday of the poet Robert Burns, born in 1759, with a Burns Supper that includes a haggis, a recital of his 1786 poem "Address to a Haggis," and a lot of whisky. The deep-fried Mars bar, which reportedly started life in a chip shop in Stonehaven in the 1990s, is the modern equivalent. Scotland has a proud tradition of testing whether anything can be improved by adding batter.

Even the monster is a bit of patter. The most famous photo of the Loch Ness Monster, the 1934 "Surgeon's Photograph," was a toy submarine fitted with a sculpted head. A man involved in the hoax admitted it decades later, and it has not slowed down Nessie tourism one bit. Scotland knows when it's being had, and it has always found a way to make a joke out of it.