Word of the week

• flyting n. a scolding (match), quarrelling; a contest between poets in mutual abuse
• howf(f) n. a favourite haunt, a meeting place, freq a public house
• petted lip n. the expression on a sulky face (esp. of a child); a sulky mood
• gar v. make (a person or thing do something)
• hotchin, hoatchin, adj. seething, infested, overrun (with); restless, eager

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howf(f) n. a favourite haunt, a meeting place, freq a public house

“howf(f) n. a favourite haunt, a meeting place, freq a public house ”

23rd April 2007

Howfs throughout the centuries have been places of discussion and debate, and though not always first on the Saturday night reveller's agenda, such activities are still much encouraged. As reported by the Express in July 2005, Alcohol Concern criticised 'howfs where you can neither sit nor hear each other speak'. Such establishments would no doubt have been rebuked by the eighteenth-century Scottish poets, who honed their skills in pubs and clubs. Allan Ramsay's elegy to one notable Edinburgh publican indicates his loyalty as a customer: 'Whan we were weary'd at the Gowff, Then Maggy Johnston's was our Howff'. And in 1796, Robert Burns wrote in a letter to George Thompson that Dumfries's 'Globe Tavern ... for these many years has been my Howff'.

Yet not all historic howfs were literary training-grounds, and in John Galt's Annals of the Parish (1821) when a businessman 'set up a change house (a small inn) in the clachan ... it was opening a howf to all manner of wickedness, and was an immediate ... offspring of the smuggling trade'. Figurative uses also appear in such texts as Gabriel Setoun's The Skipper of Barncraig (1901): 'Philosophy's like onions, grand for a strong digestion, but some folk canna thole them; I've no howf o' them mysel', nor yet o' your philosophy'.

Howf is also used of a shelter or place of refuge, specifically a natural or improvised shelter used by mountaineers. According to an issue of the Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal from 1948, 'The best known example of a mountain howff is the Shelter Stone of Loch Avon'. Howf can also denote 'a shelter with latrine used by workmen on a building site', as recorded in the periodical The Builder (1952). Is this the Scots translation for Portaloo? Or do you have a better suggestion?