Am I, or amn't I confused?

Grandson gives Granddaughter a little rock in her rocking chair / car seat. All together now: aaaahhhh. Yes, she does appear to be dressed, seasonally, as a rabbit.

What a lot of interesting comments on my last post.

I’m Scottish and have lived all my life in Edinburgh. Here, as in (I imagine) most areas, there are quite a lot of dialect words that we use or are at least very familiar with. I might write about some of these in another post; and on the whole, we’re aware that they are Scots words. But sometimes I’m not sure whether our use of what seem like normal English words has a particularly Scottish twist or not – such as my use of “I can reach it fine” the other day. (In that case, it seems not.)

I know that “fine well” is a bit Scottish … or at least, I think it is – as in “I know fine well that you broke the vase” or “I knew fine well that I should have brought it, but I forgot”. There’s a derogatory tone – a suggestion that I might be supposed not to know, but I do - and trouble may ensue.

“Squint” is another word that I discovered relatively recently isn't used (is it?) in England to mean “crooked”. Here, pictures can be squint; teeth can be squint, or noses, or handwriting. (Also eyes, but I think this is also true in Standard English. Or is it used only as a noun or verb? “a squint” or “to squint”?)

And I don’t think English people say “amn’t”. I can’t think why, since it’s jolly useful: “I amn’t sure if I can be there on time”. All right, we could (and sometimes do) say “I’m not sure if I can be there on time”. It’s probably more common in the question form: “Amn’t I lucky / right / clever / taller than you etc ?” I suppose we can be formal and say “Am I not lucky?”, but it seems to me that this throws emphasis on the “not”. I think – correct me if I’m wrong - an English person would tend to use “Aren’t I lucky?”

I’m interested that Australians use “fortnight” (though not Americans - or Canadians?) and that only English service stations actually say “jackets” instead of “jacket potatoes”. Actually, now I think of it, I could believe that in my youth, we may also have said “jacket potatoes” – not that we ever actually ate such things very much so it didn’t arise. (I can't imagine why we didn't eat them. We didn't have a very varied choice of vegetables in 50s Britain but we did have potatoes. I'd have been delighted to get a nice baked potato with cheese.) I wonder if the term “baked potatoes” is the American form and has come here from over the water?

In 1970 I spent some time in America and remember hearing the expression "a tad". I'd never heard it before and had to work out the meaning from context. Now it's common here, though I don't think I use it much. Does it mean something different from "a bit" or "a little"? Is it smaller?