Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/206

182 booths or close shops were so called in contrast to the stalls set up on the street. The "lucken-gowan" is the closed daisy. The latter part of the Cumberland compound "cworn-later" seems to be connected with Go. leithan, to go, Eng. lead, a verb with many derivatives. The Border herd's cruel mode of splitting up birds, frogs, &c., is known in both districts as spang-whew. In Clydesdale, again, a straining sieve is also known as a syle. Stranger, still, is it to find faggot as a term of reproach turning up in Campbeltown, where also skybel is well known as a good-for-nothing. "In lots there were helter-skelter skybels frae Carel" (Carlisle). Norse influence explains these affinities, as also the presence in the North-eastern counties of such Cumberland words as grice and shot, applied to young pigs; gob, spit, foam; geat, a bairn; wax kernels (waxin kernels in Fife) for glandular swellings in the neck; sned, a scythe handle (Kincardine); swine-crü (Fife crüve), a pig-sty; thyvel (Fife theel), a porridge-stick; weyt (Fife wecht), sheep's skin covering a wooden hoop, to lift corn; whicks (Fife quickens), roots of couch grass. It must be the same Northern leaning which accounts for such remarkable German representatives in the Cumberland dialect as byspel, a guy (Beispiel); flittermouse, the bat (Fliedermaus); shirk, a slippery character (Schurke); unfewsom, awkward, unbecoming (Ger. fügsam, pliant); skemmel, a long seat without a back. This last is German Schemel, a seat. Butcher's shambles were stools to show the meat in open booth or market as in Old Glasgow, where they were known as shemels. But the whole volumes are calculated to send one off on a stream of "divagations."

The "Glossary" could not but be suggestive at many points to the student of Scott and Burns. Sackless, innocent, a word now obsolete but used in "Rob Roy," appears in a Cumberland sketch in dialect: "Ah wasn't sec a sackless as he'd teann meh teh be." Curious is it to find the wyliecoat of the "Fortunes of Nigel," and familiar in old literature, still used in Cumberland in its usual sense of an undervest. The "rannel-tree," which Davie Deans uses in his vigorous denunciation of latter-day backsliding in Church and State, is annotated at great length by Dr. Prevost. It was the beam from which hung the inglecrook in the large, open chimney. In "Guy Mannering" a