By Betty Kirkpatrick
If you have been living in Scotland for any length of time you will know that this is Burns Night. It is time, therefore, for a lot of people to get dressed up in tartan and pretend they like haggis. Many of these will be attending one of the numerous Burns Suppers that will be taking place worldwide, supposedly to honour the bard.
Some will be faced with the task of addressing the haggis. Those who like the sound of their own voices and pride themselves on their knowledge of Scots will be looking forward to this. Others will be dreading the ordeal and wondering why they ever agreed to address the haggis in the first place. Could they perhaps throw a sickie?
The reason for their disquiet is quite often linguistic in nature. The people in question may be Scots, but their knowledge of the language may be hazy in the extreme. Yet they somehow have to get their tongues round words which are unfamiliar to them – and, worse, memorise them. They can hardly read from a book while slashing the haggis, can they?
One of the early problem words which they encounter is hurdies, as in:
The groaning trencher there ye fill, Yir hurdies like a distant hill, Yir pin wad help to mend a mill In time o' need, While thro' your pores the dews distil Like amber bead.What on earth does hurdies mean? Technically a haggis does not really have hurdies, but what’s a bit of poetic licence between friends? Hurdies are reserved for humans and animals. The word means the buttocks, hips or haunches. Burns used it again in Tam o' Shanter, this time of a human, the poet himself:
Thir breeks o' mine, my only pair, That aince were plush, o' guid blue hair, I wud hae gien them off my hurdies, For ae blink o' the bonie burdies!For those of you who are not up to speed with your Tam o' Shanter, this means that the poet would have given the trousers off his buttocks for the sight of some beautiful young women. In fact, he frequently did. Hurdies is pronounced as it is spelt, but do not forget the "r". It has been around the Scots language since the 16th century and its origins are lost in the mists of time. The word has faded a bit from popular use, perhaps because it sounds a bit too solid for an age when hips are not really acceptable until they are need in of replacement. I cannot really see "Do my hurdies look big in this?" catching on. Hurdies supplies us with a phrase to describe a situation which is all too common in these difficult times. The expression is ower (=over) the hurdies, meaning in financial difficulties, deep in debt. Well, I suppose it is not quite as bad as being up to the ears, eyes or neck in debt.
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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