The first and possibly only time I heard the term short leet<\/i> in real life was in 1995 when I was applying for teaching jobs in and around Edinburgh. At one point, I was informed that I had been placed on the short leet for a position. To which my response was, “the short what?”<\/p>\n
Betty Kirkpatrick writes in the Caledonian Mercury about useful Scots words and phrases<\/a>:<\/p>\n A short leet is used to describe a list of selected candidates for a job or an office which has been compiled from a longer list. Thus, the list of candidates most likely to get the job is a short leet. This is a good place for job-hunters to be unless all the other names on the list belong to relatives of board members.<\/p>\n Leet was first recorded in Scots in the sixteenth century In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a short leet was applied specifically to a short list of nominees for the seats of the retiring members of a burgh council. This short leet was a culled version of the original, much longer, list of nominees for these posts, the longer list being known as a long leet. It was the reduced list, or short leet, which formed the basis of the voting. Leet could also be a verb and meant to put a candidate\u2019s name on a select list.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n A quick google search shows that the phrase is still in use, but only in Scotland. And even so, it’s not very common.<\/p>\n The reason I thought about it is because I’m working on my occasionally-annual-and-rarely-timely Radio Sunpig playlist for 2015. iTunes used to make it easy for me to compile my short leet, because since 2005 I had used a fairly rigorous classification scheme for rating songs that I downloaded and listened to<\/a>. The short leet was basically the list of 5 star songs from each year.<\/p>\n I use Spotify instead of iTunes<\/a> now, and Spotify doesn’t have granular options for rating songs. So I’m having to use a combination of Spotify’s playlists (junk), Last.fm’s listening history<\/a> (actually very good), and my own Mixed Media posts here on sunpig.com to help me out. I’m annoyed at iTunes<\/em> because Spotify<\/em> doesn’t have ratings. See how that works?<\/p>\n Anyway, Radio Sunpig 2015 incoming soon. Some great songs last year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The first and possibly only time I heard the term short leet in real life was in 1995 when I was applying for teaching jobs in and around Edinburgh. At one point, I was informed that I had been placed on the short leet for a position. To which my response was, “the short what?” … <\/p>\n