Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/128

104 the slang and coterie talk of the masses. Thirty years ago to every boy in East Fife correction by the time-honoured taws was known under the name of pawmies, French paume as in jeu de paume or rackets. As far back as 1604 we find the Aberdeen Presbytery enforcing a magistrates' edict ordering that, "for repression of oaths and the like, every householder should keep a palmer and therewith punish all offenders." Nowadays in East Fife pawmie has given place to caker, an incomer from Dundee. In those early days neither the Dundee accent nor vocables had travelled far across Tay. But increased intercourse by rail has altered all this. Similarly, a learned friend assures me that curn, a small quantity, is not indigenous in the Kingdom of Fife but imported from Forfarshire. From the North, too, has recently crept all along the coast the "Smoky," as the modern development of the Finnan Haddie is called.

Can the study of those homely, but fast disappearing, dialects be justified on the score either of utility or necessity? Certainly no one would wish the flavour of rusticity or provincialism to linger about what any educated Scotsman either speaks or writes. In this he must be inspired with such an ambition as that which made Burns so ardent a student, to know and to use English as well as any educated Englishman. But this, no more than in his case, need cut us off from those charms of memory and imagination by which homely speech keeps us in touch with rural life, simple manners, time-honoured customs, youthful associations. For my own part the study of those poor relations in the family of speech has vivified forgotten associations, explained much that was obscure, and thrown many side-lights on what was deemed familiar. For it would be a great mistake to assume that the average man, though born and brought up in Scotland, knows these expressions, so apt to be looked down upon, when those who are very much above the average in intellectual curiosity and capacity are found wanting in this knowledge. A Galloway laird, a well-known and versatile contributor to current literature and an authority on matters Scottish, was talking with some farmers on his own estate. When he spoke of the Guisers his auditors failed to follow him, as they knew them only as the Mummers—children who go from door to door at Hogmanay time. Later on they had the