Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/222

198 Proceeding in less obvious directions, we meet with many Boer words that are rich in suggestions of old-world ways and words in Lowland Scotland. This is true even where comparison with German is directly involved. Thus the Volksraad or council of the folk points clearly to German Rath, counsel, but it lived almost to our day in Scotland. Burns in his "Epistle to a Young Friend" says, "And may you better reck (heed) the rede (counsel) than ever did the adviser." Its kindred sense of good order survives still as in the phrase, "to redd up (tidy) the house." The champion of the Raad had an obviously German name, Krüger, a tapster, but this again is from Krug, well known in Scotland as crock, a mug or tankard. Since this served as a sign, a krug is in Dutch also a common public-house. The regular Dutch for crockery is crock-werk. Leem, or clay, was a seventeenth-century borrowing from Holland, for Sir Robert Sibbald in his "Stirlingshire" tells us where laim was made in the county. Grigor says ("Glossary of Buchan Dialect") that in Buchan it now means a broken piece of crockery. It is difficult to associate the simple, patriarchal, pious Boer with a taste for the alehouse, but those familiar with him do not hesitate to say that he is sometimes "under the influence." Anyhow, he knows the Dutch for a village alehouse, kneipe, familiar, as a comparatively recent borrowing from Holland, among German students, who revel in their Bier-kneipen. One is tempted to connect it with "the reamin nappie" of Burns. To judge by the Buchan use of nappie it primarily refers to the jug and not the liquor it contains. The Boer has two words for a dram—a sopje and a slag. Thus in "A Veldt Official" a Boer says, "Come in and have a glass of grog, Musgrave; we'll have our sopje anyhow." It suggests the soupe that old Hawkie afforded in "The Cottars," though this was in the innocent form of milk. The Taal "slag" is just the familiar Scottish slocken, to quench thirst. In Shetland sluck is to gulp in drinking. And as gorge and gully both involve the metaphor of a throat-like pass, so slack is common in place-names for a defile. Thus we have the farm of Gate Slack in the long glen or Pass of Dalveen, of which Burns sings in "Last May a Braw Wooer."

The Boer is essentially a nomad, taking naturally to a roving life in his waggon with all his dependants, as did his remote