By Betty Kirkpatrick
Times may be hard, but every time I go out for a meal in our capital city the restaurant is jam-packed, no matter what day of the week it is and no matter how foul the weather is. Perhaps the diners are desperately trying to take their minds off their dismal financial situation, or perhaps they have all decided to use up their surplus cash before it swirls off into some banking bank hole.
Whatever the reason, restaurateurs are understandably taking advantage of the situation and trying to accommodate as many people as possible. More of them are restricting the amount of time diners can dally over their meal by rebooking the table after a certain time, and some are encouraging waiters to wheech plates away even before diners have finished eating. Put your knife and fork down at your peril.
You will probably be familiar with this dining experience – but, if you are not a Scot, you may not know the word. To wheech in this sense is to move something away very quickly and suddenly. It is a case of now you see it, now you don’t.
In origin, the word was probably intended to imitate the sound made by something moving swiftly through the air. The English word whisk is similar in meaning, although it does not capture the action so successfully. In wheech, the ch sound is pronounced like that of this sound in loch or dreich. It is not pronounced to rhyme with leech.
The verb wheech can also mean to move along very quickly. Thus, you might almost get knocked down by a child wheeching along the pavement on a scooter or rollerblades, or you might see the bus you should have caught wheeching merrily past the bus stop before you can get to it.
As a noun, wheech can mean a sudden sweeping movement, as in removing a plate of untouched food with an angry wheech. It can also mean a whizzing or buzzing sound or a blow delivered with such a sound.
In the days when corporal punishment was considered perfectly acceptable in schools, the plural form wheechs was used to refer to a belting with the tawse or leather strap – a painful and unforgettable experience, as many older readers will recollect. A wheeky-whacky day was a day when the belt was more in use than usual. Perhaps the teacher was in a particularly intolerant mood, or perhaps the pupils were in a particularly disobedient mood. Either way, there was much belt-wielding done on a wheeky-whacky day.
But to revert to a much more pleasant subject, that of fine dining. Next time you go out for a meal, have a good time but do not get so involved in a conversation that you forget to eat or to keep an eye on your plate. You might just see it being wheeched away before you can enjoy its contents.
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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