Spug
The house sparrow has a number of names in Scots. Perhaps the commonest are spug and speug with their diminutive forms spuggie and speuggie, but we also see sprug, spur, spurdie and sprauch. The latter appears in Blackwood’s Magazine (1828):
“Their numbers ... seemed to justify the humanest of boys in killing any quantity of sprauchs. ... You had but to fling a stone into any stack-yard, and up rose a sprauch-shower”.
Oh dear. And numbers seem to have diminished greatly in some places since then.
The famous fragility of the young bird is evoked in Modern Scottish Poets VI (1883, edited by D. H. Edwards):
“Wee flitt’rin, flecht’rin, half-fledged spurdie”.
Hence, spug and its variants are used figuratively of slender or small people. These wee birds have other qualities though. Little, lively and feisty people are likened to them, and their courage is recognised in John Carruthers’ A Man Beset (1927) as being inversely proportional to their size:
“Andrew was ‘a tifty speug’ - and fought hard”.
Loud sparrow song heralds Spring, and in Richt Noise (1988) Raymond Vettese drew this familiar picture:
“The trees hae tongues, birds gree, e’en the spuggies harmonise.”
There is a similar image drawn in Peevers in Parliament Square (1958) by John Oliver:
“When the linty sings sae cheerily, And the speugs are thrang at cheepin’.”
Spuggies have their uses too, in this case helping to keep slugs at bay:
“… but the spuggies chirp awaa in the buss [bush] … that kep the slugs at bay.”
(George T Watt, Gutter, 2014.)
This Scots Word of the Week was written by Chris Robinson. Visit DSL Online at https://dsl.ac.uk.
Crabbit
Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL) defines crabbit as “in a bad temper, out of humour”. The word has a long pedigree in Scots, with one of the earliest examples being from Legends of the Saints (c.1400):
“Sume men sais he crabyt is”.
Later, in 1788, the term appears in the Poems of James Macauley:
“For tho’ we may na get our fill O’ what our nibour has at will - It shaws we hae na muckle skill, Gin we be crabbit”.
And in 1785, Robert Burns declares in his poem Scotch Drink:
“Let other poets raise a fracas, ‘Bout vines, an’ wines, an’ drucken Bacchus, An’ crabbit names an’ stories wrack us, An’ grate our lug: I sing the juice Scotch bear [barley] can mak us, In glass or jug”.
Strong liquor as an antidote to grumpiness?
The word pops up again in Alexander Hislop’s Proverbs (1862):
“He that’s crabbit without cause should mease [calm down] without amends”.
Liz Lochhead gives us this in her Scots translation of Moliere’s Tartuffe (1985):
“You’re that crabbit, you’re no offering, Much help or pity for me in my suffering”.
Finally, in August 2022 the Dundee Courier reported on a gentleman suffering the effects of his own snoring:
“I’d go to bed and read my Kindle then the next thing it would hit me on the face as I’d fallen asleep with it in my hand. I was also getting up three or four times a night too. I was angry all the time, just crabbit at the world”.
This Scots Word of the Week was written by Pauline Cairns Speitel, Dictionaries of the Scots Language https://dsl.ac.uk.
Ackie peevie
As the 20th May is World Whisky Day, I thought I would look at this word in the Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL). DSL supplies a one-word definition (“whisky”) and tells us that it came from Kirkcudbright in 1929.
The term is referenced in a column entitled “What a Scotsman Says” from the Dundee Courier of July 1931:
“‘What is Ackie Peevie?’ Mr Grant [William Grant, an editor of The Scottish National Dictionary, now part of DSL] finds it in Kirkcudbright as recently as 1929, translates it as ‘whisky’, and says it ‘is evidently a hybrid formed on the model of acqua vitae’.”
DSL cites that indirectly and also references the Tinkler Gypsies (1906 edition by Andrew McCormick) to add some more information: peeve means whisky among the Gypsies of Galloway, Perthshire, and Argyllshire. The second element probably derives from Romany péava “to drink” and piva “water”.
Many words from Travellers have been adopted into Scots. Certainly “peeve”, as a general term for alcohol, has. One example comes from the Scots Magazine Volume 15 (1931):
“Ackie-peevie is an old friend of mine, although I am a life abstainer! Forty years ago, I noted it in Stirling where it came from an old slater...”
though the slater was referring to a soft red stone, so that is where the trail goes cold. Research within the Travellers’ community could perhaps enlighten us as to whether this term is still current or, like many venerable and useful Scots words, it has fallen out of general use.
This Scots Word of the Week was written by Pauline Cairns Speitel, Dictionaries of the Scots Language https://dsl.ac.uk.
Snirtle
Last Sunday was World Laughter Day and the Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL) has many words for laughter. To snirt or snirtle is “to snigger, to make a noise through the nose when attempting to stifle laughter.”
“Tho’ his little heart did grieve… He feign’d to snirtle in his sleeve”.
(Burns, Jolly Beggars, 1786)
Alexander Smart’s poem Rambling Rhymes (1834) features the word too:
“The grin of pale-faced envy, and the mere Sardonic ‘snirtle', one can well despise”.
In The House with Green Shutters (1901), George Douglas Brown gives us another definition:
“Snirt, a continuous gurgle in the throat and nose.”
And James Robertson, writing in the magazine Chapman in 1988, uses it that way too:
“Come the keek o day, an the first bummer [factory horn] gaed aff - loud eneuch, ye'd hae thocht, tae wauken the deid. But it didna steir our man - na, na, he juist snochert an snirtit an keepit on sleepin.”
Suggesting that the word might have been falling out of use in 1941, the Scotsman provided a formal dictionary definition:
“Gone will be the days when the man who dares to be choosy in his speech will raise an embarrassed snirt * *Snirt: Chambers’ Dictionary n. a smothered, laugh. v. snirtle, to snicker. [A variant of snortle.]”.
However, as recently as 2021, Derrick McClure used the word in his Doric version of Alice Through the Looking Glass. She is talking here to Deedledum:
“Ailice gied a snirtle. ‘Ye maan ding the trees fell aften I wad jalouse’.”
This Scots Word of the Week was written by Pauline Cairns Speitel.
Visit DSL Online at https://dsl.ac.uk.
Norn
Norn is defined in the Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL) as:
“The variety of Norwegian spoken in Shetland and Orkney … along with Lowland Scots throughout most of the seventeenth century, surviving fragmentarily into the nineteenth century, and now represented mainly in vocabulary”.
An early citation comes from the Orkney and Shetland Records (1485), referring to
“This letter in Norn”.
There follows (in 1633) a rather snippy description from Sibbald’s Orkney and Shetland published in 1711:
“Many of them are descended from the Norvegians [sic], and speak a Norse tongue, corrupted, (they call Norn) amongst themselves”.
John Wallace echoed this in An Account of the Islands of Orkney (1700):
“All speak English, after the Scots way, with as good an Accent as any County in the Kingdom, only some of the common People, amongst themselves, speak a Language they call Norns”.
Some more up-to-date examples include the following from a book review published in the National of November 2019:
“Wark in the Scots an the Gaelic is aye walcome, last year there wis even a bit in Norn, the Nordic langage o the Norn Isles”.
In September 2022, winner of the Scots Speaker of the Year, Marjolein Robertson, observed in the Edinburgh Evening News:
“Fir me da best way is tae keep it alive in wir very mooths. An wi da internet, ders mare opportunity tae share wir dialect an wirds. Shetland is a dialect comprising o wir auld language Norn as weel as Scots. So it's a boannie blend o ancient Norse tongue an Scots language”.
This Scots Word of the Week was written by Pauline Cairns Speitel. Visit DSL Online at https://dsl.ac.uk.