Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/172

148 is the peasant's sned, to head and tail turnips. Such terms often preserve obsolete farming processes, such as cannas (canvas), used to catch the winnowed corn. Hence the Buchan proverb for independence, "I can win (winnow) i' my ain cannas." A cannas-breid was a familiar expression for size, as, "A cot wi' a cannas-breid o' a gairden." Mink is a Morayshire variant on monk (Fife), the head-stall of a horse. Grigor's " Glossary " gives the act of coiling up a rope as minkan-up, and a rimin-mink as a slip-knot. " Mink up the coo's tether," is one of his phrases. Call-names for domestic animals are wonderfully persistent, such as Trooie (Moray) to a cow, for the Fife Prooie, or the Buchan Treesh. The duck call, Wheetie, and the pigeon, Peasie, are both widely spread. My friend was not so famUiar with geld (to castrate, hence gelding), as with its variant lib, of which he had an odd application. If one was getting in new potatoes, before starting to lift he would say, " I'll gae an' lib twa or three to see what kind they are."

Similarly plants and animals had their special names. My friend did not know the Fife name for the ragwort, the weebie, or the Ayrshire bun weed, but called it stinking Willie, just as in Ulster, where it is the stink-weed. From a strong and persistent root it sends up a cluster of tall stems crowned by a mass of small yellow flowers. One variety of the plant, the tansy, has a peculiarly pleasant odour when pressed. My friend had the usual old "freit" about the weed: "It liket a bit good ground and did na grow weel in Buchan," for instance. It is certainly evidence of disgracefully bad farming. I have seen a small paddock beside a County Down homestead so covered with the growth as almost to hide the grazing cow. The farmer let himself be cheated out of two-thirds of his grass, when he could have scythed down the weed within an hour. Eagwort grows freely in ill-drained, poor pasture. The cornfields were equally impoverished by what in Moray was called the gool. The pretty yellow of the wild chrysanthemum is tolerable enough on a small scale ; of old it must have been odious to anyone but the sluggard. The yaar or corn-spurry is not quite so obtrusive. It grows low but spreads far and thickly. Both were pronounced to be " very bad, very destructive." He had the popular aversion to the harmless newt—"abominable