CRY v call

Although this Scots verb shares many of its senses with English, some are distinctively Scots. Both languages have cry in the sense of making a public proclamation. A merchant may cry his wares, for example. In Scotland and New England, before a wedding, the banns are cried. We find the essential news described in E. S. Rae’s Private J. McPherson (1917) as “Fa wis kirkit, fa wis cried on, fa wis born, an’ fa wis deid”.
The most distinctively Scots senses of cry are to name or summon. So you might cry your collie Black Bob. F. Niven asks in The Three Marys (1930) “Cry ye a cab, Sir?”. We see a sixteenth-century example in Pitscottie’s History and Cronicles of Scotland: “Thair come ane thunderand woyce out of heawin cryand and sowmmondand him to the extreme iudgement of God”. Crying back has a specific sense in relation to the recently departed. Alexander Laing’s Lindores Abbey and its Burgh of Newburgh (1876) records an old belief “that if a child or other relative is withheld from dying by being ‘Cried back’ (as the prayers for its continuance in life are called), it will be deprived of one or more of its faculties as a punishment to the parent or other relative who would not acquiesce in the Divine will”. Another superstition is that ‘cried-back’ spirits will provide mourners with a vivid and horrific description of the world into which they have passed.
A usage recorded much earlier in Scots than in English is in the phrase ‘to cry down’ meaning to condemn publicly. In 1457 we get the famous proclamation of James II “That the fute-bal and golfe be vtterly cryed downe, and not to be vsed”. It does not appear in this sense in English until the late seventeenth century.

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

This week's Word is spoken by Dr Dauvit Horsbroch.