Word of the week

• Haiver, haver v. To talk fooolishly; n. nonsense, a person who talks nonsense.
• SKELP n to slap, spank; v to strike, spank;to work vigorously; to hurry
• HAIRST (n) harvest.
• Gate
• hamesucken n. (the crime of committing) an assault upon a person in his or her house

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Haiver, haver v. To talk fooolishly; n. nonsense, a person who talks nonsense.

“Haiver, haver v. To talk fooolishly; n. nonsense, a person who talks nonsense.”

30th September 2008

haiver

In spite of its popularity among Scots speakers today, haiver is a comparative newcomer to the language, the earliest quotation in the Dictionary of the Scots Language dating from as late as 1776. This comes from the Weekly Magazine Or Edinburgh Amusement and takes the form of an expression of concern by a Caithness man whose friend’s behaviour the previous evening has cost the speaker a sleepless night: “Troth, Branky, man, I hinna faul’t my een Since here I left you havrin’ late the streen”.
The sense of haiver extends from drunken or delirious ramblings, as in Violet Jacob’s Bonnie Joann (1921): “Aside ye, I hech an’ I haver, I’m het an’ I'm cauld”, to harmless conversation, as this 1842 quotation from the Quarterly Journal of Agriculture shows: “Doctor, it is not every day I see you; we must go in and have a haver”. Between these extremes, J. L. Waugh, in Heroes in Homespun (1921) captures both the quantity and quality of haivers: “She was the most havering, garrulous bletherskate it had ever been my misfortune to meet”. You may have your own views on where the average sermon fits into this spectrum, but Lewis Grassic Gibbon reflects in Grey Granite (1934): “A braw-like life in a pulpit, maybe, nothing to do but habber and haver and glower over a collar on back to front”.
The alliterative use of the synonyms habber and haiver is just one example of the almost infinite variety of Scots vgocabulary. The language abounds in words for talking nonsense, including the conveniently rhyming clavers which Burns used in the Guidwife of Wauchope (1787): “.Wi' clavers an' havers Wearing the day awa”. To this we can add clash and the almost onomatopoeic clishmaclavers. Ay, an auld haiver need never be short of Scots words.