By Betty Kirkpatrick
They say that weather conditions have made this a particularly good year for midges, although obviously not for the people whom they feast on. It seems to be have been a particularly good year for dandelions also, although not for the gardeners who have to howk them out. Modern dandelions seem to have particularly tenacious roots and there is no point in pulling or tugging at the dandelions. A good howk is what is required if you are to have any degree of success.
The Scots verb howk, in which the "ow" sound rhymes with "wow", is a later form of Scots holk, which has connections with Middle English holk and an old German verb holken meaning to dig. Howk’s original meaning was also to dig, as in to dig a trench, and then it went on to mean also to uproot or extricate. As is the case with howking out dandelions, there is an underlying sense that the process of howking is an arduous task.
We tend to associate howking with tatties, or potatoes to the less well-informed. I can speak with some experience of tattie-howkin as I am of that generation for whom the tattie holidays in October, if you lived in rural parts and needed the money, often involved such a back-breaking task. Nowadays, the October school holiday is sometimes still known in some quarters as the tattie holidays, but the humble tatties are no longer involved. The tattie fields have long ago been replaced by Spanish beaches or somewhere more exotic.
At least in my day, tattie howkin did not involve actual digging. This process was carried out by a tractor-pulled mechanical digger. Picking the tatties, however, was still arduous and it was murder on the back. No wonder the expression howk-backit, having a bent back, arose. If you spent long enough lifting potatoes you could very easily end up with one.
My other experience of howking involved neeps (turnips or swedes), not tatties. When my children were young Trick or Treat had yet to invade our shores and there was no such thing as a pumpkin lantern at Halloween. Light had to be provided by a candle in a howked-out neep. Such a task was very hard on the hands and it was certainly not a job for the nail-proud.
Howk was also used to mean excavate coal from a mine. No, I have not actually tried that, but I had relatives who did. If you have a persistently painful tooth and do not want to go near a dentist, you can howk it out by a tying one end of a piece of string to the tooth and the other to a door knob before slamming the door. End of tooth and toothache, hopefully. Staying with body parts, you can also howk your nose, but do not do so in polite society. Seeing someone picking their nose is not a pretty sight.
The verb howk can be used figuratively to mean to unearth something or to bring something to light, in the same way that dig can. So you can howk out an old forgotten book from the attic to lend to a friend. Howk can also be part of an investigative process. It can either be used to refer to legitimate research or to unwanted, interfering nose-poking.
As you will have seen, howk mostly involves a great deal of work. However, another sense of the word crept in. Howk can also mean to stand around idly or loaf about. That sounds altogether a much more pleasant prospect than howking either tatties or dandelions.
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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