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xwordfan I very much concur - I adore Scotland and admire the Scots - I plan to retire there - but my countenance drops when I face a Scottish solution to find - I yearn for a Scots thesaurus - if anyone knows of one I'd love to hear...

There is an online Scottish Dictionary…..
http://www.dsl.ac.uk/
This is often helpful.

Thank you Elle, I will add this to my favourites - M

You are very welcome!

A recent clue in the Times daily cryptic was;
Police arresting people over room wrecked with one skull perhaps (7,4)

It was a phrase I had to Google as I hadn't heard of it, but I knew from the grid that the second word ended with an "i" so it was unlikely to be English.
Perhaps it could say Latin in brackets after the clue to stop us racking our brains trying to find an English phrase that fits.

My view is the clues should be left the way they are.
Surely racking your brains is part of the fun of solving the clue?

TreborNotlaw, I liked the clue you gave - and certainly wouldn't have wanted 'Latin' in brackets. Yes, many people will have racked their brains to get the answer - but that's part of the fun of crosswords! It's a reasonably well-known phrase, so I'm sure the clue was solved quickly by many solvers. Words and phrases that are obscure to one person will be fairly obvious to others.

Good word play rules in my book, if that works then it doesn't matter how obscure the answer is really.

I think the key thing here is that the English language includes a great many words and phrases which have been directly imported from other languages. The Latin ones may stick out for some people, but if setters were to indicate 'in limbo' and 'verbatim' as [Latin], they would surely need to show 'duvet' as [French], 'kaput' as [German] and 'junta' as [Spanish].

..................and the list is endless!
Kaput was understood at a French garage when our car broke down!