Word of the week

• midden n. rubbish heap, dunghill, enclosure for refuse; a mess, muddle, shambles
• trauchle n. tiring labour; a long tiring trudge; a burden etc.
• lug n. the ear; any projecting part of an object
• maukit adj. filthy; putrid; infested with maggots

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midden n. rubbish heap, dunghill, enclosure for refuse; a mess, muddle, shambles

“midden n. rubbish heap, dunghill, enclosure for refuse; a mess, muddle, shambles”

24th September 2007

Midden is often used of a place for storing refuse, as demonstrated by this example from the Orcadian in May 2000: " Westray ... Outbuildings comprise two byres (one slatted court), open silo with effluent tank, bull pen, store, garage, engine room and midden area". An unusually precise description of "the midden, a three-sided brick shed where bins were kept", is found in Alasdair Gray's novel Lanark (1981).
Midden is a word of Scandinavian origin and is found in some of the oldest surviving Scots texts, including John Barbour's Legends of the Saints (c1380), where pigs are described as lying "in the myddyng". Some middens produced materials that could be easily recycled, as described by Robert Maxwell in his Select Transactions of the Honourable the Society of Improvers (1743): "Midding-dung either unmixed or compounded with earth ... should be plowed into the ground as soon as possible after it is laid on it to prevent waste by exhalation". In the poem Willie Wastle (1792), Robert Burns describes the eponymous hero's wife as having "walie nieves (huge fists) like midden-creels", a midden-creel being a basket for carrying dung.
Since at least the early nineteenth century, an untidy person has been at risk of being called a midden. In her account of Elizabeth de Bruce (1827), C. I. Johnstone wrote: "If there was an object on earth which Monkshaugh loathed ... it was a slatternly dirty woman ... "What's to be done with that rampallion midden, 'Lizbeth?" said he, reddening". A more recent instance occurs in Ian Pattison's A Stranger Here Myself (2000): "A hunchbacked beggar in a long coat sleek with grime sang up at the closed window, eyeing us as he did so ... 'I have the gift of irony,' he called in a rasping voice. 'Try the gift of soap, ya clatty midden,' countered Maureen".