Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/202

178 Yooer for udder is a good illustration of omission of a dental between vowels; cf. wa'er for water.

Hotch, what the Alston miners call a jig. The Burns reader will remember the midnight Free-and-Easy in Alloway Kirk,—

The word expresses primarily deep and rapid breathing under excitement, as in "Hech, sirs!" "a hacking cough," "Heigho, the wind and the rain!" and even the "Hoeh!" of the phlegmatic Teuton. The Scot's innate love of graphic metaphor leads him to widen his words with the freedom of an artist. "Any fish in the burn to-day?" "Fish! the pools is fair hotchin'."

Kast, to place peats on end so as to dry them: "A pony cart-load of peats had been cast by his sister." The Lowlander knows so little on this head that he might think it referred to throwing them out of the hole. The word properly implies a change of position, as "a cast in the eye," "a cast ewe," "cast up," and the saw, "Ne'er cast a cloot or May be oot."

K.—This letter was formerly pronounced in knit, knap, and knot. "My grandmother used to articulate easily and without effort the k in knitting, knee" (D. H.). I can distinctly remember that my grandmother said k'nife. An Aberdeenshire Jacobite old lady, long after the memory of the '45 and its repression of Scottish Episcopacy had died out, stoutly refused to honour the Hanoverian, "though Bishop Skinner sud pray the k'nees aff's breeks." A more persistent peculiarity is the omission of the letter t when between vowels, common in Cumberland and with all the slovenly speakers in south-western Scotland. The dalesman's "laal," however, is more easily managed than the Lanarkshire for little: "Axt him if he'd ivver seed laal sprickelt paddicks wid phillybags an' gallasses on." Dr. Prevost explains that "phillybags were long drawers visible below the skirt, formerly worn by boys and girls"—a fashion we all know from Leech's pictures of the early Victorians. But what has "ta Phairshon" to say of this insult? Some of his forebears certainly got short shrift at Carlisle 'Sizes. An English book,