By Betty Kirkpatrick
One of the unfortunate consequences of growing older is that the joints get a bit stiff and we get a good deal less supple. You may once have been gazelle-like in your movements, but no more. Now you tend to lumber rather than skip about.
Scots has a great word to describe this condition – stechie. If you are stechie you are stiff-jointed and consequently slow-moving when any kind of physical effort is called for, even just getting out of a chair. Note that the ch of stechie is pronounced like that of loch. Stechie does not rhyme with tetchy.
Stechie is an adjective, but it is often used as a noun to address someone who is making heavy weather of climbing a hill, going upstairs or just climbing on a bus – as in "Come on stechie. Get a move on." Do not be upset if someone makes such a remark to you. It may sound a bit insulting, but it is often used in a friendly, humorous way, sometimes to children or dogs.
The person so addressed need not be particularly stiff-jointed, but may be someone who easily gets out of breath, possibly from lack of exercise. Alternatively, they may be either too overweight or too lazy to be able to leap about lithely.
Indeed, stechie may have originally meant fat or easily made breathless, either of these states tending to make people slow-moving. Figuratively, the word can be used to mean stiff in the sense of restrained and not all relaxed, as in "Nobody knew each other and the atmosphere was right stechie to begin with".
Stechie probably has its roots in the verb stech, which has several meanings. It can mean to stuff yourself with a great deal of food, as many of us tend to do over the Christmas period. Another meaning is to stink out a place with fumes or bad air, as smokers used to do before they were banned from doing so in public places.
Yet another sense refers to cramming too many people into a place. One result of this is that the people become steched. In other words they feel too hot and sweaty. This condition is often a result of people having too many clothes on for the temperature of their surroundings. We have all been there. You are all wrapped up for a freezing winter’s day and you have to stagger round department stores in sauna-like temperatures – steched.
The last meaning of stech is the one most relevant to stechie, to gasp or pant as a result of over-eating or of over-exertion. In fact, in this sense it means much the same as another Scots word that it rhymes with – pech. If you are feeling particularly over-exerted you might do both of these, stech and pech.
Surprisingly, stech appears in a phrase that means the very opposite of exerting yourself. The phrase is stech in bed and it means to pamper yourself by having a lie-in. You may well have to do this after steching yourself on Christmas goodies. Further effort may be beyond 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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