Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/118

94 On the other hand, the particular is preferred in beasts for farmstock, harvest or hairst for autumn, policy for pleasure grounds, planting for plantation, corn for oats, victual for rations, labour for to till, manage for to get through with. Another mode of particularising is to use my or the as "Is my dennir ready?" "I'll come i' the noo" for just now, or "the morn's mornin'" for to-morrow morning, I've got the cold, going to the kirk. Where quantity is concerned Scots follows the German partitive usage as a bit bread, a wheen grozers, even a few soup. Equally German is some better for somewhat (etwas), cow milk, a cloth brush. It also prefers the plural for the expression of a distributive sense in dealing with materials as thae (these, but a quite different and older form) soup or porridge, my linens for underclothing, corns for crop, pennies each, mournings, jobbings. Contrariwise it follows a Saxon practice in saying six horse as we still say ten feet, twenty year. Scotland, it has been sarcastically said, has quietly annexed England, and it may be part of the process to find expressions now in general use which a purist like Beattie, an Aberdeen professor of last century and very notable in his day as philosopher and poet, warned his Northern contemporaries carefully to avoid if they wished to conceal their origin. He instances homologate, maltreat, militate, restrict (limit), liberate, succumb, notice, wrote him. He warns his compatriots not to say, "Give me a drink," but a draught, and to speak of a milch cow, not a milk cow. The Latin re, now in general use, is a poor equivalent for the "anent" of his taboo-list. From good Scots writers of almost his own day one can cull curiosities of usage, such as Cockburn's frequent use of "transpire" and Jeffrey's "refrain" as an active verb in the sense of the Lat. refrenare. English writers of an earlier period use what would now be scarcely admissible expressions, such as Swift's "Styles and I do not cotten," or Penn's advice to his sons in his will, "to act on the square;" or a use of idioms now purely Scottish, as Defoe to Harley, "I doubt I throng you with letters."

Idioms die hard. In spite of free schools, penny magazines, and penny poets, these expressions will long remain to betray the Anglified Scot. Dialect words, on the other hand, disappear with the pursuits, customs, and all the concrete equipment of