Threap
Threap has a long pedigree. Its root is from Old English þréapian, to rebuke, and Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL) records various meanings in Scots:
“to argue, dispute, quarrel”, “to assert, insist, maintain obstinately”,
to
“nag at, be insistent, importune, urge some action upon”.
There’s a vivid depiction of quarrelsomeness from John Carruthers’ A Man Beset (1927):
“That auld threapin’ bubblyjock Targelvie.”
DSL also gives an example of a meaning some may argue is typically Scottish,
“to beat down a price, haggle for a reduction in charge”.
It comes from John Wilson (Christopher North) in Noctes Ambrosianae (1827):
“I wad hate to dine wi' him at a tavern — for he wad aye be for threepin doun the bill.”.
More recently, the word featured in The National (March 2018) in an article which still resonates today:
“Dr Andra Mackillop … telt me at the picket line: “This threap owre pensions is yet mair pruif that the structures o oor public services are being dung doon. University high heid yins consider their ain staff as nae mair nor financial liabilities, an students as piñata fu o siller tae be dunted at will”.
Threap is still very much in use, as this example (meaning “to harp on in general, keep talking endlessly about”) shows. Keeks Mc’s poem A Great Breetish Simmer (2023) depicts a typical family holiday:
“The wather, which locals threap wis glorious til theday, is chilpy, gowsterie an gray makkin a mockery o aa the haliday-makkers in thair breekums and vests ‘makkin the maist o it’”.
This Scots Word of the Week was written by Pauline Cairns Speitel. Visit DSL Online at https://dsl.ac.uk.
Bodach
In the Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL), bodach is described primarily as
“an old man; often used in a more or less contemptuous way … a person of small stature”.
The word comes from the Gaelic, meaning an old man.
It was also used by Scott and others in the sense of a spectre or bugaboo, and DSL gives an example from Highland Widow (1827):
“Oh! then the mystery is out. There is a bogle or a brownie, a witch or a gyre-carlin, a bodach or a fairy, in the case?”
In Herd [Shepherd] of the Hills (1934), Allan Fraser implies both smallness of stature and contempt:
“He told of how Alicky Mag, the daft wee bodach that he was, had been taken away at last”.
In what sense he was taken away is not stated.
Moving into the noughties, Davie Kerr’s A Puckle Poems (2000) has:
“Then up sprang an old bodach, (who’d been dying almost daily). ‘Come in’, he beamed a welcome, ‘and we'll haff [sic] an early Ceilidh’”.
As recently as June 2022, an old joke appeared in the Press and Journal recounting an elderly man’s visit to his doctor for a check-up. The next day the doctor spies the gentleman with a young lady on his arm. Says the doctor:
“‘You’re doing really well…’. The bodach said ‘Well, I am only doing what you told me to. You said to get a hot mama and be cheerful.’ The Doctor replied, ‘No… I said you have a heart murmur so be careful.’”.
This Scots Word of the Week was written by Pauline Cairns Speitel. Visit DSL Online at https://dsl.ac.uk.
Caledonian cream
Dictionaries of the Scots Language defines this as:
“A dessert of whipped cream with marmalade, sugar brandy and lemon juice”.
Mrs Dalagairns’ The Practice of Cookery gives us this recipe from 1829:
“Mince a table-spoonful of orange marmalade; add it, with a glass of brandy, some pounded loaf sugar, and the juice of a lemon, to a quart of cream; whisk it for half an hour, and pour it into a shape with holes in it, or put it into a small hair sieve, with a bit of thin muslin laid into it”.
(The Oxford English Dictionary defines hair sieve as “a sieve with bottom made of hair finely woven, usually for straining liquid”.)
More than a century later, 1985, Catherine Brown’s Scottish Cookery lists slightly different ingredients:
“… cream cheese with bitter Seville marmalade gives a sharp flavour to the cream...”.
Evidently it is startlingly good. This comes from Shadow of the Serpent (David Ashton, 2007):
“...a touch of surprising delicacy as regards desserts … Edinburgh Fog, Caledonian Cream and the like”.
James Drummond's Onward and Upward (1983) records a variation:
“Caledonian cream 2 tablespoons red currant jelly, 2 tablespoons sifted sugar, whites of 2 eggs. Switch together for half-an-hour”.
Hopefully an electric beater was available.
Either way, we all know it should be marmalade and, of course, whisky can/should be used. In February 2023, the Jewish Chronicle reported the “stars of this super simple dish” as:
“marmalade along with the whisky, juice from the orange, and sugar.”
Obviously, not forgetting the cream.
This Scots Word of the Week was written by Pauline Cairns Speitel. Visit DSL Online at https://dsl.ac.uk.
Whink
August 26 was International Dog Day. I like dogs, so I am delighted to contribute a word to mark the occasion.
Whereas the distinctive Scots words for the noises made by cats are rather few – nurr and thrum for ‘purr’, waw and yaw for ‘mew’, loll for ‘caterwaul’ – there are numerous words for the sounds dogs make. Moreover, Scots distinguishes rather delicately between these noises, including such splendid words as guff ‘a low bark’ (a Shetland usage), nyaff ‘yap of a small dog’, wow ‘deep-throated howl’, and yatter ‘yelp’.
Today’s word, whink, is one such form. According to the Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL), whink means
‘to bark in a sharp, suppressed way, to yelp as when chasing game’;
there is also a related noun meaning a sharp, suppressed bark. The word seems to be restricted to the Scottish borders and not to have been used after the first quarter of the twentieth century.
Interestingly, whink isn’t recorded before the early nineteenth century, when the great lexicographer John Jamieson cited it in his 1825 supplement to his Etymological Dictionary of the Scots Language. Nevertheless, it’s likely that the word is much older. DSL suggests a link to the English form whinnock, which means the smallest pig in a litter and is a compound of whine and the diminutive ending -ock. So it’s possible that the form in Scots has become specialised over time to canine contexts. Indeed, the earliest citation in DSL indicates that badgers could at one time whink like dogs.
This Scots Word of the Week was written by Jeremy Smith. Visit DSL Online at https://dsl.ac.uk.
Hawkie
Hawkie is defined in the Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL) as general Scots:
“A cow with a white face; also a general term for any cow or a pet name for a favourite one”.
An early example in DSL comes from 1728 in Ramsay’s Poems:
“Twa herds between them coft [bought] a Cow: Driving her hame, the needfu Hacky”.
Still in the land of poetry, in Poems (published in 1773), Fergusson writes:
“Niest the gudewife her hireling damsels bids, Glowr thro the byre, and see the hawkies bound”.
Later, in the nineteenth century, Scott (in Old Mortality, 1816) noted:
“The troopers of Tullietudlem took the red cow and auld Hackie”.
This hawkie fared no better in Burns’ Address to the Deil (1785):
“By witching skill; An’ dawtit [much loved], twal-pint Hawkie’s gane As yell’s [dry] the Bill [bull]."
Around the same time, he painted a less spooky picture in The Cotter’s Saturday Night (1785-6):
“But now the supper crowns their simple board, The halesome parritch, chief of Scotia’s food; The sowp their only hawkie does afford, That, ’yont the hallan [screen/partition] snugly chows her cood”.
Speaking of Burns, an article in the Carrick Gazette (January 2019) about the saving of Burns’ cottage in Alloway recorded that:
“Visitors can see where Burns and his family lived, side by side with their farm animals, and where Burns got his earliest schooling. The walls of the cottage have been daubed with fragments of his verse and a selection of Scots words, such as hawkie and crambo-jingle [doggerel verse]”.
This Scots Word of the Week was written by Pauline Cairns Speitel. Visit DSL Online at https://dsl.ac.uk.