Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/90

66 In Mid-Scotland he is only "a man," but his help is a hafflin, an extra hand is an orra man, while the hagg is charged with the feeding of the nowte or rather cattle-beast. Harness and farm implements have much the same names all over the country, but some exist only because of conditions special to a district. Thus in the hay-making regions of Lanark and Ayr a slyp or sledge is well known. Burns graphically visualises the action of the verb when he tells how the auld mare Maggie in her best days "spread abreed her well-filled brisket" at a stiff bit of ploughing, "Till spritty knowes wad rairt an' risket, an' slypet owre." The word and the implement came from Holland originally. In Gaelic slipe appears as sliob, a stroke, a rub, a lick; Ir. sliohhaim, to polish; Norse slipa, to whet; Du. slijpen, to polish, sharpen; A.S. slipan, to glide. In Ayrshire the word is used for whetting a scythe or for a whetstone. Gaelic helps also with the graphic risket of Burns in its reesk, coarse grass, marshy land, morass with sedge; Ir. riasg, a moor, fen; Eng. rush. Sprits are rushes growing where the water spurts or oozes out.

In house affairs there are seen similar dialectic differences. The "bain" or bucket of the west is unknown in the east, where it is a cog or kimmin. The bairn of Fife is the wean of Lanark, the gett of Aberdeenshire. This latter term in Morayshire was always applied to an illegitimate. Even words that seem ridiculously easy to a Fifer are but little known in the west, such as dubs and puggies, a poalie finger and a ploatet pig. Perhaps not quite so much familiarity can be claimed for another Fife word, a willie-miln, a latch or door fastening worked by a string. Its origin is obscure. As it has lingered longest about the Dysart and Kirkcaldy district, it may preserve the name of some skillie smith body about Pathhead, otherwise unknown to fame. It is not a little humiliating to think that these and suchlike decadent expressions, so hamely to many of us, and so rich in the kindliest of associations, will speedily go the way of worn-out coin.

No better test of the survival of a vernacular is to be found than the general intelligibility of proverbial sayings. Where a community cherish these, apply them aptly, and even coin new ones on the old lines, there is dialectic growth. They