Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/171

Rh The management of the domestic animals produces many-special terms. My Morayshire friend distinguished three stages in the life of an ox—calf, stirk, stot. A colt was a clip and not the usual " staig " (Gael, cliob, explained by MacBain as anything dangling; cliobach, hairy, shaggy; cliobog, a colt; clibeag, a filly). In German, Klepper is a pony. It is certainly surprising to find any word like the German Klepper in Morayshire. Kluge suggests that Klepper—akin to our clip, what catches by an embrace — may be from the little bells on the harness, or from the short, clipped action in running. The Celtic sense, as MacBain gives it, seems preferable to this. The tether which secured the cow in the stall or at grass was the baikie. In Fife an upright pole, secured to the floor of the byre at one end, to the roof at the other, had a sliding ring on it, to which the collar of the cow was attached, so that its head could move freely up and down. This was the coo-baikie. The word was never used in any other connection. In Northumberland the collar was a bent wooden band shaped like a horse-shoe, and called a f rammelt or thrammelt. This was attached to the upright baikie. Here we probably have the name for the apparatus that occurs in "Johnie Gibb," an Aberdeenshire story, viz., sells and thrammles. Sele or sale is a word widely diffused over the Indo-European tongues, and always in the general sense of a rope. In Moray the rope which passed over the cow's head and connected the two wooden cheeks of the branks or headstall was the iver or over-sell. Compare the Go. in-sailjan, used where the bearers of the paralytic lowered his bed by ropes through the roof, " in-sailidedun thata badi."

The expression, hovin, for a cow swoln up after eating wet clover, has such variants as heftet (Fife), and boutent (Moray). For Nithsdale Shaw gives us an unusual application of "heftet "—domiciled as of sheep used to a pasture, evidently a metaphor from haft or heft for a handle. But the Gothic Gospels (Luke XV. 15) say that the Prodigal Son gahaftida sik, hired himself. Boutent is from the Buchan bowden to swell, used always in this connection. Dialect is rich in tool and implement terms. The Fife deeple, a variant of dibble, is in Moray dimple, used in planting "neeps and kale." "It took," said my friend, "three men to dimple an acre a day." A variant, again, on snod, neat,