By Betty Kirkpatrick
Whether you cast a cloot before or after May was oot you are very probably in the process of redonning it, if you have not already done so. What am I talking about? Most of you will know, but for the sake of the uninitiated I will tell you that I am referring to a piece of sage advice – ne’er cast a cloot till May be oot (out).
Roughly speaking, this is a warning to people not to throw off their winter garments too soon on the assumption that summer has arrived. An argument has waged for decades over whether the May in question is the month or the hawthorn blossom, but I do not intend to get involved in this.
A cloot is a piece of cloth, but it can also, as here, be used of an article of clothing and the cloot referred to in the warning may well be a semmit. A semmit is a man’s undershirt or vest, although semmets were once sometimes worn by women, and it was originally made of wool or flannel. The word is sometimes spelt simmit and its pronunciation often follows this second spelling, however it is spelt.
Like so many words, semmit is of uncertain origin. The word semat appears in Old Scots in the 15th century referring to a Roman tunic but semmet is much later. It has been suggested that semmet may be a form of the English word samite meaning a fine silk cloth or a garment made of this. Samite, derived from old French, and sometimes interwoven with gold, was often used for ecclesiastical garments in the Middle Ages.
Samite sounds as though it was a cut above the semmet which was a fairly humble, basic garment and hardly stylish. Now of course such a garment can be made of materials other than scratchy wool or flannel. The semmit can be made of cotton or a man-made fabric, and perhaps even silk, and can come as part of a thermal package.
The problem is that, in this capacity, it has probably sloughed off the name semmit and become a vest. There is a price to be paid for becoming stylish. This is a pity. If we had stuck to semmit we would never had got caught up in the confusion between American and British English that exists with regard to vest.
In British English, vest is the equivalent of semmit. In American English a vest is a waistcoat and, in commercialese at least, this use has caught on in British English to some extent. Far better to stick to semmit. You know where you are with it and it feels as though it is time to put it on right now.
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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