Scottish word of the day: Agley
However, it is most often used figuratively to mean ‘gone awry’, as in its earliest recorded and still most notable usage; by Robert Burns in his 1785 poem To a Mouse
The line ‘The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley’ provided the inspiration for the tile of John Steinbeck’s 1937 novel Of Mice and Men
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Hide AdBut the word has been adopted by writers closer to home too, including humorist P.G. Wodehouse, who had his quintessentially English protagonist Bertie Wooster utter lines including: ‘Reasoning closely, I deduced that her interview with LP Runkle must have gone awry or, as I much prefer to put it, agley’, from Much Obliged, Jeeves.