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• Handsel
• YULE n Christmas
• Hollin n. holly, a holly tree
• Messan n. a small pet dog, a lap-dog.
• Hoast n., v. a cough, to cough
• Droukit past participle drenched, soaked.
• Wifie n. a woman.
• SLAP n. a gap in a wall etc.
• HAP v. to cover, to wrap up.

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Wifie n. a woman.

“Wifie n. a woman.”

17th November 2008

Wifie

Wifie is the commonest diminutive form of wife but we also find wifock and, as Jack Webster assures us in Another Grain of Truth (1989), “Buchan folk possess an absolute genius for diminutives, managing to turn semantics into gymnastics with examples such as ‘Little wee bit wifikie’”.
In Scots a wife, or wifie, can denote a married woman but also retains the earlier sense of ‘a female person’ that ‘wif’ had in Old English, as this exchange in John Buchan’s Free Fishers (1934) shows: “He is tied to the petticoat tails of a daft wife.” “A wife! He is married then?” “No, no. There’s no marriage. I used our vernacular term for the other sex when we would speak of it without respect.” It is not an easy word to pin down, however. In The Gude and Godlie Ballatis (1567) we read of “Heliogabalus, Quhais (whose) lyfe in lust was spent ... Defyling maide and wyfe” which could suggest either a mature or experienced woman. Certainly modern usage often applies to middle-aged or older women and sometimes carries a slightly disparaging tone but “wee wifie” can be a term of endearment for a little girl. An “auld wifie” or a “sweetie wifie” can be a gossipy person of either gender. A strange, if rare, sense relates to a piece of wick falling of a candle – an omen of a forthcoming marriage. If you know this sense or if you have heard wife or wifie used to refer to an edible crab, we would be very pleased to hear from you.
One thing is certain - all the present editors of Scottish Language Dictionaries are female, bearing out the saw recorded by James Carmichael before his death in 1628 in his Collection of Proverbs: “Quhair there is wyves, there are there words”.