sgrìob /skree-UP/. noun. According to Robert Archibald Armstrong’s A Gaelic Dictionary, this so-called untranslateable means “an itching of the lip, superstitiously supposed to precede a feast or a kiss from a favorite.” Thus sgrìob poige (before a kiss) and sgrìob dibhe or sgrìob drama (before a dram).
“…the Gaelic speakers of Scotland, not to be outdone, have a word for the itchiness that overcomes the upper lip just before taking a sip of whisky. (Wouldn’t they just?) It’s sgriob.” (Bill Bryson, from The Mother Tongue)
“[Allan Brown writes:] ‘You might think, for example, that the word sgriob is just a bad hand at Scrabble; it’s actually the Gaelic word describing the tingle of anticipation felt in the upper lip before drinking whisky. The fact that Gaelic has a six-letter word for this while English has a twelve-word phrase reveals a lot about Gaelic ways and priorities.’
No it doesn’t. It reveals nothing. I happen to know a one-syllable word (turd) for a piece of excrement shaped by its expulsion from the anal sphincter, but that doesn’t reveal a lot about my ways and priorities. It is a completely meaningless and useless random factoid about the lexicon of the language I happened to grow up speaking. That lexicon also contains scrum, buttercup, ogre, bong, and thorium. If you try to form an impression of my ways and priorities from such things you’re a moron.” (Geoffrey K. Pullum, from Language Log)