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plunk v. to play truant, absent oneself (from school) without leave

“plunk v. to play truant, absent oneself (from school) without leave”

26th May 2008

Plunk is a term of uncertain origin, though it may possibly have some connection with Dutch plenken, to play truant. It is first recorded in John Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language (1808), the muckle tome that set the benchmark for historical dictionaries for centuries to come. In 1905 the Argyllshire Herald contained the poetic lines "Twas there we hid oor books an slates when we did plunk the schule", and another rather genteel example occurs in Anna Blair’s novel of bygone Glasgow, More Tea at Miss Cranston’s (1991): "The only time I plunked the school was to see Earl Haig going along Great Western Road".

Plunking school is the sort of offence that can be expressed by several different terms, depending on the context. The more authoritarian accusation of playing truant can be contrasted with less formal terms like skiving and bunking off. Growing up in Ayrshire, one local variant was "dogging it", as in "Whaur’s Andy the day?", "He’s dogging it". This expression, first recorded in a Scottish source in 1916, appears to be gaining in popularity, judging by its increasing presence in modern Scottish literature. For instance, Edinburgh writer Gordon Legge uses it in his 1994 novel, I Love Me (Who Do You Love?): "Anything to do with lassies and you ran a mile. You were the guy that dogged it on the last day when we had dances at the school, that was you. Scared". Interestingly, a similar use of the verb dog is found in US English, defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as "To act lazily or half-heartedly; to shirk or avoid responsibility, risk, etc.; to slack, idle", and it may be the case that the American term originated from the Scots usage.