By Betty Kirkpatrick
Pickle appeared in my last article because it was deprived of its birthright by mickle. Just to remind you, mickle took pickle’s rightful place in an old saying which then gained fame as Mony a mickle maks a muckle. Pickle was left out in the cold.
Pickle, in contradistinction to mickle and muckle, is used to describe something small. A pickle refers to an indefinite small quantity of something, a little. Often there is no "of" or "o" before the following noun. You can borrow a pickle tea from a neighbour, you can add a pickle sugar to a recipe, you can have only a pickle milk left, you can get a pickle money together or you can be asked to use a pickle commonsense.
Pickle can also be used to refer to a small number of anything, a few, again often without a following "of" or "o". Thus, you can be left with only a pickle coins, use just a pickle words to say what you mean, keep a pickle hens, or pick a pickle apples from a tree.
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Pickle has the common alternative form of puckle. This form is more common in some parts of Scotland than others and it is certainly the form that I have most commonly come across. It strikes me that it is now the more modern term. Thus you can wake up to see a puckle snow on the ground or you can have a puckle sausages for breakfast. Sometimes also an "of" or "o" is included now, as in only a puckle o loaves left. Pickle started out life as a grain of oats, barley or wheat. The grain at the very top of a stalk, which is considered to be of the very best quality, can be described as the end-pickle or tap-pickle. Figuratively the tap-pickle of your career is your most significant achievement yet. In parts of Scotland and Ireland, the pickle next the wind referred to the next daughter in a family due to be married, the assumption being that daughters would get married in order of age. It was too bad if you found the love of your life when your elder sister had not. The word pickle then, not unexpectedly, extended its grain sense to mean a tiny piece of something, a speck or pellet, as in a pickle salt, a pickle dust or a pickle oatmeal. From there it was just a short hop to its modern meaning which is actually not that modern, since it came into being in the middle of the seventeenth century. Like many words, both Scots and English, its derivation is obscure. We Scots tend to go in for understatement, one of our highest forms of praise being "no bad". Pickle/puckle is also to be found in understatements when, of course, it really means a lot rather than a little, as in He must have a puckle bawbees to afford to live there, or She says she’s very poor, but I bet she’s got a puckle o quid tucked away. To hae a pickle in means to have taken a drop to drink, but whether this is an understatement or not depends how tipsy the person doing the drinking is.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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