Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/95

Rh (Gael, paeg, small), as a pug engine, a pug plane is a joiner's tool. A small Shetland horse is a gur-pug (garron, a nag, and pug). In primitive times this word must have been applied to the fairies, always described as the little folks, cf. Puck, pixie, the wee pechs. Henry Morley ("Shorter Poems," p. 234) has a very interesting note on Puck, written also, he says, as Pouke and Pug, the former of which is first found in "Piers Plowman," signifying the devil. '"Paecan," to deceive by false appearance, is early English. From a derivative, pickeln, to play the fool, Morley gets the usual name for a mischievous boy, a pickle.

Another pithy comparison, "as saut's pell," is well known in Fife. Jamieson notes it under pell as butter-milk very much soured, which makes little account of the saltness. I take it rather to be a survival of the times when tanning was a village industry and salted hides (pelts, Lat. pellis, skin) were common on every homestead. There is no obscurity about this: "The lift 'll fa' an' smore (smother) the laerricks"—one of many expressions for the impossible, what is most unlikely to happen, so characteristic of the canny Scot. There is surprisingly little in these proverbial expressions which might be called obsolete. They have the quality of a true style, they rarely miss the mark. Some archaisms, however, there are here. Farmers do not now call a horse an aiver, though Burns uses it, as in "A Dream," when he wishes to be sarcastically, nay daringly, familiar. A century ago it was in the north applied to a goat. It really means a property (Lat. habere and our average). The parallel word, cattle, equally abstract (Lat. capitale and chattel), has retained its special concrete bent, except in Scots, where one still speaks of a cattle-beast, plural, cattle-beas'. A few other terms in these proverbs, such as tarrow, roose, mett, eem, are now intelligible only to one fairly well read in old literature.

So far we have had illustrations of the dialectic development of a bi-lingual people, as the Scots historically are. Alongside of this distinctively northern use of English we have the pesistence of native usage in an unbroken chain. At the Union strenuous and successful efforts were made to preserve the individuality of Scots law. During the "Auld Alliance" French models had been preferred to English, and latterly