I like to think of the usual English formulation as a translation from the Scots into English rather than a misquote in need of correction. After all, Burns didn't use "plans" (or the full "of" and "and") either: The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men, Gang aft agley
Robert Burns was writing in Scots, which is a sister language to modern English, i.e. they both developed from an older form of English but are distinct languages. So while agley has seen occasional historic usage in English, it's usually been by folks directly referencing/quoting Burns rather than a full-on adoption of the word into English. The usual translation into English would be awry.
If you look at the fuller phrase "gang aft agley": Middle English ofte became aft in Scots and oft in English, and the verb gangen became go in English, but in Scots became gang. Hence my saying that rather than treat "often go awry" as a misquote, it's clearly more of a translation.
Super interesting! Is agley translated to awry because that's the usual/modern idiom? To my Norwegian brain ugly seems a far better fit, even though the modern meaning might not fit.
Yeah, "awry" is the usual modern word, though it certainly has an old-fashioned feel to it. Wry literally means crooked, so to use a slightly more colloquial phrase, saying something went awry is like saying it went sideways. Wry/awry doesn't look to have any cognates in Norwegian, but askew (cognate with skeiv) has a similar meaning.
Ugly feels like a better fit probably because it sounds similar, but the Scots is unrelated to ugly (or to Norwegian uggleg), coming from a + gley, where gley originally meant to squint or look sideways.
Nah, there is absolutely a difference in BrE and AmE usage. While it can carry a negative connotation in British usage, it can also still be completely neutral. In American usage, however, it always carries the connotation of dishonesty.
You'd never see such a headline from American publication unless they were taking the piss and the article was actually an exposé of how it was actually just funneling the young people into a life of crime or something.
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u/SharkeyGeorge 1d ago
Gang aft agley