Plank
The Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL) gives a selection of definitions for plank. The one we’re focusing on here is:
“to put in a secret place. Hide, secrete, stow away for later use.”
As children, did you spend time in December searching for where the presents had been planked? Perhaps the following from Alex G Murdoch’s Scotch Readings (1886) refers to present-hiding:
“Hide it below the bed, or ‘plank’ it on the highest shelf in the house”.
The next citation in DSL comes from nearly 100 years later. In Agnes Owens’ Gentlemen of the West (1984) this appears:
“‘Ach, I’m away,’ said Baldy. ‘I think I’ve got a bottle planked somewhere in the Drive’”.
Another (from Anna Blair’s Scottish Tales, 1987) describes a shepherd who is about to leave a place scrabbling
“frantically in the sand to find the planked treasure that would change his life.”
Traveller and author, Betsy Whyte, used the term as a command to her dog in her autobiographical Red Rowans and Wild Honey (1990):
“… I said, ‘Plank, Ricky! He’s coming again.’ This time, however, the policeman just cycled past us, giving a little wave of his hand”.
Finally, the following example appeared in the Weekly News of March 2020:
“The Queen doesn’t plank the top plonk for herself, though. She’s a famously generous host and, as royal sommelier Pippa Penny puts it, likes to ‘pull out the good stuff for the state occasions and royal banquets’”.
An affectionate picture of the late Queen not hiding her best wines.
This Scots Word of the Week comes from Dictionaries of the Scots Language.
Visit DSL Online at https://dsl.ac.uk.
Puggie
Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL) defines puggie as:
“The hole in a game of marbles into which the marbles are rolled; the bank, kitty, jackpot or pool in a game of cards or the like”
and gives the related senses of a one-armed bandit or fruit machine and a cash-dispenser.
One-armed bandits or fruit machines first appear in DSL in the following from Michael Munro’s The Patter (1985):
“... The word is also used to mean a one-armed bandit or fruit machine, and I have also heard of it being used for an automatic cash-dispenser outside a bank: ‘Ah just put ma kerd in your puggy an it swallied it!’”.
An experience dreaded by all of us.
In the twenty-first century (2003) a DSL Edinburgh correspondent sent in this usage:
“Ah’m aye gaun tae the puggie tae tak oot money”.
We would be interested to hear if anyone has more recent published evidence for puggie meaning ATM.
The term is still in use for fruit machines. Janey Godley, writing in the Herald of February 2006, recounted:
“I like the upstairs bar at the Ubiquitous Chip in Glasgow. When I owned a pub I hated the puggie machines and blaring televisions and the Chip has neither”.
More recently and a telling sign of difficult times (again in The Herald - September 2022) the following almost elegiac observation appeared:
“Another pub taking down the darts board, emptying the puggie, sweeping under the pool table for any stray 50 pence pieces and closing its doors for good”.
This Scots Word of the Week comes from Dictionaries of the Scots Language.
Visit DSL Online at https://dsl.ac.uk.
Chippit fruit
The definition of chippit in the Dictionaries of the Scots Language is succinct:
“damaged, especially of fruit”.
We have oral examples from Edinburgh, such as this from 1992:
“Until circa 1975 chippit fruit was labelled as such in Rankins’ fruit shops”.
And this from 1993:
“My father always brought a big bag of fruit home on Friday nights and woe betide any of us if we were caught eating chippit fruit”.
Earlier, this poem to the editor of the Leven Advertiser and Weymss Gazette (1916) by M McVey bemoaned wartime shortages:
“That you should thankful be You get your livin’ wi’ your pen, An no a shop - like me. If you but kent the miles I rin, For things I haven’t got; Empty boxes, chippit fruit, An’ carrots for the pot”.
And a writer in the Aberdeen Evening Express (1983) recalled her childhood in the old tenements:
“At the bottom of our backie wis auld Jimmy Lobban’s fruit shed, and, my God, we got oorsel in some grief, as we used to slide off the top looking for left over chippit fruit”.
Writing in the Diary column of the Scotsman (1998), Dennis O’Donnell was unimpressed by Radio 4’s Today programme’s list of potential personalities “of the Millennium”:
“For one, it is crushingly unimaginative … Caxton, Newton and Darwin worthy but dull (smudgy books, chippit fruit and monkey puzzles), but Cromwell?”
In 2001 Dennis O’Donnell also described hiding expensive items in the trolley from his wife
“... when she’s away looking for bargains in stale rolls or chippit fruit”.
This Scots Word of the Week comes from Dictionaries of the Scots Language.
Visit DSL Online at https://dsl.ac.uk.
Gean
Dictionaries of the Scots Language defines gean as
“the wild cherry, Prunus avium, and its fruit”.
An early example (1735) comes from Life and Labour on an Aberdeenshire Estate and is an excerpt from an inventory:
“4 Ash planks and 2 geen...4/- [4 shillings]”.
Another spelling appears in John Leyden’s Scenes of Infancy (published in 1844):
“The guine, whose luscious sable cherries spring, To lure the blackbird mid her boughs to sing”.
In Jock, to the First Army (from More Songs of Angus and Others, 1918) Violet Jacob writes these elegiac lines:
“O Rab an’ Dave an’ rantin’ Jim, The geans were turnin’ reid When Scotland saw yer line grow dim, Wi’ the pipers at its heid...”.
Later in the twentieth century Angus Martin’s 1998 Song of the Queen gives us this simile:
“A bleezard oot aff Bennan, lan nae langer seen; the Firth a swirl o saftness lik blossom o the gean”.
The word is still in use today. Here are a couple of examples. First, from Stuart A Paterson’s poem Blate (Wheen: New and Collected Poems, 2023):
“Ma chakks will gan rede as a gean, ma shooders will drap tae hauf-wey, ma palms will nae doot be like twae guddled troot and ma heid will fill full o bad lies.”
And second from Angus Whitson describing in the Courier (11 May 2024) a drive through Kilberry.
“We’d come at the right time because the roadsides were awash with bluebells and yellow primroses and the frothy white blossom of geans, our Scottish wild cherry.”
This Scots Word of the Week comes from Dictionaries of the Scots Language.
Visit DSL Online at https://dsl.ac.uk.
Itchy coos
Not bovines with a rash, but:
“anything causing a tickling, specifically the prickly seeds of the dog-rose or the like put by children down one another’s backs”.
Dictionaries of the Scots Language gives a further definition from the Glasgow Bulletin of September 1957:
“The childhood game of putting ‘itchy-coos’ down one another’s back”.
Back in February 2003 there was much political wrangling in the Scottish Parliament, leading to this description in the Daily Record:
“Hyperactive ferrets in sacks lined with itchy-coos have quieter social relations than the Scottish Labour party”.
Rosehips have therapeutic uses too (Herald, 2019):
“Known to mischievous children as ‘itchy-coos’ thanks to their seeds’ ability to cause irritation when slipped down somebody’s back, these shiny fruits are so high in vitamin C that during the Second World War they were harvested on a grand scale and made into rosehip syrup”.
Iain Winton described the more mischievous practice in Last of the Lucky Childhoods: Growing up in Glasgow in the 40s and 50s (2022):
“Itchy coos were the seeds of a small garden rose, which when you opened up its seed pods were full of tiny hairs. These seedpods would be pushed down the back of an unsuspecting target, between his shirt and skin and rubbed hard, the result was agony!”.
Finally, a reviewer of Scottish Plant Names: An A to Z (Gregory J Kenicer, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, 2023) found it
“unexpectedly amusing. We learn the etymology of names like Stink Davie, … foxgloves (witches’ thimbles), bluebells (crow’s toes) and roses (itchy coos).”
This Scots Word of the Week comes from Dictionaries of the Scots Language.
Visit DSL Online at https://dsl.ac.uk.