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• guddle v. catch fish with your hands; prod, poke; mess about; work untidily

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guddle v. catch fish with your hands; prod, poke; mess about; work untidily

“guddle v. catch fish with your hands; prod, poke; mess about; work untidily”

3rd March 2008

Guddle is an everyday word in Scots and Scottish English, but it is less well-known in other parts of the world. It first appears in written records in the early nineteenth century, at which time the now rare Scots word ginnle, the gills of a fish, was also used as a term for manual fishing. James Hogg describes catching fish by this method in The Wool-gatherer (1818): “I guddle them in aneath the stanes an’ the braes”, though in one of his Winter Evening Tales (1820), the fish get their own back, ensuring Connell of Dee a watery grave: “They guddled his loins, and they bored thro’ his side, They warped all his bowels about on the tide”.

The fishing, prodding and messy forms of guddling have all been documented since the 1800s. In 1874 an account in the Kirriemuir Observer read: “Atween the big blads o’ rain an’ ither henders (hindrances) we got, it was a dreich hairst (harvest) till’s, an’ we were clean guddled wi’d”. Modern figurative guddling can still involve fishing around, as in Jeff Torrington’s novel Swing Hammer Swing (1992): “he guddled in a box of snapshots for a particular photo”.

Guddle is also used to describe an unruly mess, as in Anne Donovan’s novel, Budda Da (2003): “ma mind wis a complete and utter midden—a right guddle a thoughts and feelins fleein aboot aw ower the shops”. Thanks to the efforts of world-stravaigin ex-pats, this word also appears in more exotic contexts. In her autobiographical tale of life in The Gambia, Under the Baobab Tree (1992), Rosemary Long writes: “My evenings are a fluster of garlic prawns and peppery meat balls, a guddle of curried chicken and rice and pasta and salads”.