By Betty Kirkpatrick
Many Scots of a certain age will have memories of a Scots word used in their childhood and never encountered since. Trying to locate the word later in life can be tricky. Some words were local to some areas of the country and not to others, so even a contemporary fellow words enthusiast might not be aware of your particular word, if you come from different parts of Scotland.
Searching in reference books for a Scots word is a more formidable task than searching for an English word. The spread of printing in England set off a process that led to the standardisation of spelling in English, but this did not happen in Scots. The result is that a great many Scots words have several possible spelling variants and this can greatly impede a word search.
The word I set out to chase up had certainly plenty of such variants. It appears that it could be spelt heeze, heise, hese, hease, hyse, hize, to name only some of the variants. I had only ever come across the word in speech and so I could only guess at a likely spelling on the basis of the pronunciation. It was pronounced to rhyme with rise and so I presumed it was spelt heise or hize, the former because the word sounded Germanic.
My thoughts on its roots proved accurate, because this word of so many variants comes from a Low German word hissen and has connections with Dutch hijschen. These words mean to raise or lift and are also related to the English word hoist.
Here I hit another problem. As the origin would suggest, the core meaning of Scots heeze is to lift, raise or hoist, also being used figuratively. To heeze up your heart is to raise your spirits or to cheer up.
All this is very interesting, but this was not the meaning of my youth. The word I was looking for meant to hurry, as in They were late and were heisin up the road to catch the school bus.
Finally, I found this meaning – to travel fast, hasten, hurry – but it was far down quite a long list of meanings. These include to hurry or whisk someone away, to dance in a particularly lively way, or to enjoy yourself by making merry. Other meanings are to increase, as rents or prices, or to swarm or teem with, heezin wi being a synonym for Scots hoachin wi. (There are several spelling variants of this, too.)
I still have not found anyone who is familiar with the heise/hize spelling or the hurrying meaning. It was apparently more common in Perthshire and Kinross and so, if you hail from there, you might be familiar with it.
Back to heeze and hoist. Apparently there was a game called heezie-hozie, or eezie-ozie, in which two players stand back to back with arms interlinked. They then stoop down alternately, raising the other from the ground as they stoop. Don’t try this at home or someone might have to heise you to Accident and Emergency, especially if your partner in the game is considerably more substantial than you.
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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