Alan Jacobs


definition as poetry

#
ABER, adj., sharp, acute, as an edge-tool; clear, well-defined, as a cloudless sky; eager, as a hungry fish at a bait; secure, as a knot on a line; ardent, severe; v., to sharpen, as a knife; to stir up and make bright, as a fire.
— A piece of Shetland dialect, reported poetically in James Stout Angus’s A Glossary of the Shetland Dialect – as we learn from Robert Macfarlane