By Betty Kirkpatrick
I have commented before on the fact that Scots is rich in words relating to dirt. One of these words is mawkit.
Now there is dirt and there is dirt, and mawkit lies at the filthy end of the dirt scale. Commonly also spelt maukit and sometimes mockit, mawkit is a two-syllable word pronounced as it is spelt with the emphasis on the first syllable which rhymes with law.
There is often more than a hint of exaggeration in the use of mawkit. People and things so described may not be quite as dirty as the word suggests. Mawkit is often used of children and certainly, even in these days of over-protection, some children have a propensity to get absolutely filthy. They can rightly be described as mawkit. However, a few smears of chocolate on the face and white shirt do not really merit the use of mawkit.
Similarly, houses and cars have been known to be described as mawkit, when really all they are in need of is a bit of a dust and dicht (a quick wipe). Mawkitness, like beauty and so many other things, is in the eyes of the beholder.
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Given its meaning, mawkit is obviously anything but a pleasant word and, appropriately, its background is far from pleasant. It is derived from mawk, which came to Scots from Middle English, and probably has its origins in Old Norse. A mawk, or mauk, is a maggot. For the sake of those unfamiliar with maggots, they are soft, pale-coloured, worm-like creatures which are the larvae of flies. They are often to be found in rotting meat and other unsavoury things. They also inhabit corpses which have been left lying around and this gets them a mention in a lot of crime fiction these days. Apparently, forensic scientists can date the time that has elapsed since the death of the corpse by assessing the stage of development of the maggots. Gruesome, but true. Rotting meat and abandoned corpses can literally be described as mawkit. As well as being a noun meaning a maggot, mawk can be a verb meaning to infest with maggots. In English, both the past tense and past participle of regular verbs is formed with the ending "ed", but in Scots this often becomes "it". Thus mawkit literally means infested with maggots. Sheep are apparently martyrs to this problem when they get maggots embedded in their flesh. Rotting meat, corpses and sheep are not the only things that could rightly be described literally as mawkit. Raspberries, for example, can become infested with maggots and so become mawkit. I once had a close encounter with some mawkit raspberries when I was working in a long-closed small canning factor during a university vacation. We were told that the contents of any baskets of raspberries showing signs of maggots should be emptied into special containers. Cynics claimed that the contents of these were then boiled up and had the maggots skimmed off before being made into jam. Did I believe this? Of course not.Betty Kirkpatrick is the former editor of several classic reference books, including Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary and Roget’s Thesaurus. She is also the author of several smaller language reference books, including The Usual Suspects and Other Clichés published by Bloomsbury, and a series of Scots titles, including Scottish Words and Phrases, Scottish Quotations, and Great Scots, published by Crombie Jardine.
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