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Scots Language Centre Centre for the Scots Leid

CAIRD noun a tinker, a gipsy; a rough person

The origin of caird comes from Gaelic ‘ceard’ and means a tinker or worker in metal. At what point it became a pejorative term for a gipsy is unclear.

 

It first appears in the Dictionary of the Scots Language in Alexander Ross’s The Fortunate Shepherdess (1768): “He’s either by the kairds or gypsies ta’en.” This example seems to imply that kairds and gypsies were two different sets of people who went around stealing children. (Why the myth took hold that gypsies stole the children of the settled population is lost to us.) Walter Scott’s Heart of Midlothian (1818) gives us a more neutral example: “This fellow had been originally a tinkler, or caird, many of whom stroll about these districts.” 

 

However, by 1894 S R Crockett Raiders leaves us in no doubt what the word had come to mean: “A set of wild cairds – cattle reivers and murderers.”

 

To be caird-tongued was “to be given to loose talk” and the DSL has evidence of this from informants in the Aberdeenshire area in the 1930s. A late twentieth century example also from the North East and not necessarily describing a gipsy, comes from David Kerr Cameron’s The Ballad and the Plough (1978): “There is, it is true, “Kempie” the grieve of “The Barns o’ Beneuches”, a caird-tongued (rough-spoken) man whose constant seiging (raging) finally leads to his own dismissal…” 

 

Finally, in An Anthology of New Celtic Writing edited by Anne Cameron (1995) we have an example of the original meaning: “They refused to learn English or any language but their own, they refused to put their children in school to be educated in Scaldie ways or taught Scaldie manners. And so the Scaldies, for the good of the Cairds of course, gathered them up and transported them away from the land they had known since the days of Fergus…”.

 

Scots Word of the Week is written by Pauline Cairns Speitel of Scottish Language Dictionaries.