Welsh Keywords: Cwrgi
From Planet 238
by Catrin Ashton
This is the thirty‐fourth contribution to our Welsh Keywords series – inspired by Raymond Williams’ Keywords – which offers contemporary perspectives on contested meanings of words in Welsh and how these shifting meanings continue to shape our society.
I was never a cwrgi. That was my brother. I was always referred to as cariad glên i; the ‘ê’ pronounced somewhere between an ‘a’ and a closed ‘e’. My brother though, was a lot more mischievous – a real rali boy as my Mamgu from west Wales would say. But for my Taid, who lived in the valleys just south of Merthyr Tudful, the word was cwrgi. It’s a term of endearment, meaning something like ‘little rascal’.
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