Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/125

Rh the sense of "pottering about, Handy-Andy fashion." Gregor noted it in Buchan as "labouring hard": "He tyeuve on a' weenter wi' consumption, an' dee't i' the spring," "He tew throo a' the loss o's nowt (cattle), an' noo he hiz stockit-siller" (cash laid past). In Cumberland we find "teav," to fidget with hand or foot, and "tew," physical exhaustion, as—

Even in English we have it in taw or tew, to prepare skins so as to dress them into leather. Skeat quotes here from Aelfric's "Homilies," "Seo deoful eow tawode," the devil scourged you, which explains the familiar taws, the Scottish ferula. The metaphor now is familiarly expressed by a hiding. The Shetland mode of preparing cloth suggests the old Hebridean mode of curing leather, which was to sink the hides in a stream or in a tidal flow. In the old Statistical Account there are various references to this primitive mode of fulling cloth.

Much might be said in favour of a new Jamieson. It should present the results of a scientific inquiry into the whole history and development of the Scottish language. But quite independent of such an arduous enterprise, there is room for the study of dialect, whether living or obsolescent, in respect of the localising of idioms and vocables, and especially in preserving the more obvious characteristics of tone and accent. A learned treatise on systematic botany leaves an ample field for the humble local inquirer in observing and noting the habitat, distribution, and parochial appreciation, as it were, of the familiar weeds and flowers that are "born to blush unseen" by the scientist. The English Dialect Dictionary annexes the whole Scottish vernacular as an English dialect, to be entered in much the same fashion as Wilts, Yorkshire, Shropshire words. Apart from consequent imperfect localising of words there is evidence in the entries of a loose employment of Sc., when we find darn figuring as Sc, Eng., Amer., and the kindred dash as Sc. Ir., Eng., Amer. Again the dight, familiar to every reader of L'Allegro, "The clouds in thousand liveries dight," appears as Sc, Ir., Linc, Sussex. The only Scottish authority given is Fergusson's Poems,