Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/173

Rh critturs. I've seen them in damp hoossis." It has been suggested that this prejudice was due to a confusion with the poisonous asp of Scriptures. The newt is widely known as the ask, esk in Fife. It is really the same as the river name, Esk, Celtic for water. In Cumberland the newt is the wet or water ask, the lizard the dry. Another creeping thing that he shunned was the earwig, which he knew, not as the clipsheers of my youth, but as the flachter golak. Properly the golak is the clock or beetle. The "flachter" is explained by the old man's distinction between a divot and a feal. The former was a long thin turf "cas'n wi' a flachter spade" for roofing or covering potato heaps ; the latter a thick turf, "cas'n wi' a common spade" for building the dykes that formed the universal fences or for the walls of houses, layer of stone and feal alternately. The only one that practises flachterin now is the golfer. The garrie-bee was more attractive than any golak. It was described as striped and about the size of the foggie, but having a lot more honey. The "human boy " of old, like Caliban, the primitive man, loved " the bag o' the bee." The foggie, also known as the foggie-toddler, is the small yellow bee that seems to crawl, baby fashion, over the soft, yellow fog or moss. Gar, or gor, as a prefix in plant and animal names, denotes what is large and coarse, as in gyr-falcon, gor-cock. Fozie is foggie through age from lying on the ground. In Shetland fog is fjugg, airy stuff.

In the domestic series I gathered a few fresh specimens. The gizzened tub, rendered leaky through drought, is quite familiar. Not so the Morayshire expression for correcting this fault by soaking in water again. This was known as beenin. "Deed, ee'll hae to pit that tub to been afore ee get muckle eess o't." The feeling for a telling metaphor is keen in Scottish dialect. A genial host, pressing a cronie whose drouth was of more cautious type, said, "Dod, man, yer no beend yit." The word is specially North-eastern in habitat, and so may be akin to the Danish bolner, to swell. The loss of the l is quite regular. The word lends itself to the expression of a loud, full noise, and in this aspect may be recognised in the Bullers of Buchan, where the waves make a terrific bullerin among the rocky caverns. Shaw's "Dumfriesshire Dialect" also notes the