Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/228

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The word appears with variations of vowel and sense: cup, cap, cob, ettercop (spider), kibe (a swoln sore on the heel, Shak.). Lower eminences, again, have the diminutive form, kopje, and this is merely the Scottish cappie in the kindly wish, "May you aye be happy and ne'er drink oot o'a toom (empty) cappie!" though the point of view is widely different. In Cape Dutch kop is also the favourite word for "head," and not the Hollander hoofd, which is used only in a figurative sense as die hoofd-laager or headquarters. In Holland, on the other hand, kop is regarded as a vulgar term for the head. Compare the vulgar English, nut. Similarly, the French tête is the Latin testa, a pot, while in Scots the skull is the harn-pan.

There is indeed but little play for the imagination on the monotonous veldt. It is otherwise with the torrent-swept passes of the Drakensberg, where beck and spruit have eroded the slopes into profound, rock-walled gorges. The Boer, modifying the Dutch klip, a crag, calls such a place a kloof. Here, habituated as we are to rock-bound coasts, the word is used in the form cliff. Another feature of the lofty passes is a hoek, such as Bushman's in the Stormberg, which cost Gatacre so dear. "The ground sloped abruptly down from about a hundred feet, forming with the jutting elbow of the cliff a snug, grassy hoek or corner" ("A Veldt Official"). One sees in this word a derivative from the Norse holka, more familiar in Scotland as howk, to dig up. Hence at home here a hoek is called a hauch, only the scene of it is not a rocky pass, but a broad flat holm by a riverside. In Highland scenery it is the laggan, or laich, place. Still more welcome to the trekker, as his cattle toil wearily up the pass, is the nek. "Ambling along the dusty waggon-road which led up to the grassy nek, about a mile from the township," is a bit of description in "A Veldt Official." This word is the equivalent of the French col (Lat. collum, the neck), familiar to Alpine climbers, and a form of Scots, nick, notch.

Bygone social life in Scotland is reproduced in the speech of