THRAPPLE n throat, windpipe, gullet

The first recorded example comes from Barbour’s Bruce (1375): “He ... hyt the formast in the hals Till throppill and vassand yeid in twa” (he hit the foremost in the neck so that gullet and windpipe went in two). Several quotations in the Dictionary of the Scots Language are violent, including Sir Walter Scott’s in Rob Roy (1817): “’When we had a Scotch Parliament, Pate,’ says I (and deil rax their thrapples that reft us o’t!)”. Worse, the Letters of John Ramsay of Ochtertyre, (1801) describe “One of the chief’s ancestors who said the sweetest morsel he ever ate was the thrapple of an Englishman”. Almost two centuries after it is found in Scots, thrapple or thropple makes an appearance in English, chiefly in the sense of a horse’s neck. It never achieved the currency south of the border that it has here. The phrase “to weet yer thrapple” is still in common use, as it was in Robert Fergusson’s time (1773): “The dinner done, for brandy strang They cry, to weet their thrapple”. John R. Allan in North-East Lowlands of Scotland (1952) prefers a local beverage. Whisky, he tells us “should be matured in a cask for at least five or seven years to lose any harshness and bite; for it is not worthy to be drunk till it goes over the thrapple like milk and then glows up like a rising sun”. If “Yer thrapple shuts ticht wi’ the kink-hoast” (Press & Journal 1970), you can only dream of the satisfaction of “Hoasting up a thrapple-redding cough” as described in the Poems of John Walker (1882). Staying with hoarseness of the thrapple, the expression ‘a dry thrapple’ was used by sailors as a name for the curlew, which, like many other creatures, could not be named at sea without inviting bad luck.

Scots Word of the Week is written by Chris Robinson of Scottish Language Dictionaries.

This week's word is spoken by Dauvit Horsbroch, an academic from Aberdeenshire, now living in Angus.