Foundered
Bitterly cold. Chilled to the bone. The Ulster Scots adjective for a person who has been outside in raw weather and cannot get warm again. 'I'm foundered' means I am freezing, not (as standard English assumes) bewildered or shipwrecked.
Etymology
From Scots 'foundert' (= chilled, perished with cold), Older Scots 'founder'. The standard English verb 'to founder' (= to fail, to sink, to break down) shares the same root - a horse that founders is one whose constitution has collapsed - but standard English does not carry the Scots and Ulster Scots specific cold sense. The semantic drift is one of Ulster Scots' useful preservations: the cold sense and the failure sense were originally connected through the image of a horse failing in the cold.
In a sentence
"Come in out of that - you're foundered, look at the state of you."
Historical notes
Foundered is one of the precise Ulster Scots weather-adjectives. 'I'm freezing' is the standard English equivalent and works fine in mild cold; 'I'm foundered' is reserved for the kind of cold that has gone past warming up easily - the cold after standing on a stadium terrace in February, or walking the dog in driving rain. Often heard in greeting: 'Get in, you must be foundered.'
Alternate spellings
foundert
Sources
- Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL), entry FOUNDER v., adj. (foundert sense). · dictionary
- Macafee, Caroline. A Concise Ulster Dictionary. Oxford University Press, 1996. · dictionary