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• Droukit past participle drenched, soaked.
• Wifie n. a woman.
• SLAP n. a gap in a wall etc.
• HAP v. to cover, to wrap up.

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Kittle v. to tickle, to stimulate; adj. apt, problematic.

“Kittle v. to tickle, to stimulate; adj. apt, problematic.”

20th October 2008

Kittle

This word should kittle your fancy. Hochmagandy is suggested by its earliest example in the Dictionary of the Scots Language (DSL): “Cum kyttil me naykyt vantounly”, from the Sir David Lindsay’s The Complaynte of Scotland (1549). Other less wanton quotations refer to innocent kittling of the oxters (armpits) and the feet. The throat is particularly susceptible. John Galt writes how an unfortunate churchgoer in his Annals if the Parish (1821) suffers: “A terrible host (cough) that came on her in the kirk, by taking a kittling in her throat”. If only she had read of “The famous Lozenges” in the Caledonian Mercury of 1739, “The Virtues thereof are, they perfectly cure the Cough, kittling of the Throat”.
The DSL abounds in remedies. This one, recorded by John R. Allan in his North-East Lowlands of Scotland (1952), showing kittle in the sense of ‘stimulate’ or ‘revive’, delicately explains that “married men hae sometimes a difficulty o putting their wives wi a bairn. Now there are ways in siccan a mechanter. Sometimes it's the man that's no on his mettle and a diet o good green kale can kittle him."
Allan Ramsay’s A Collection of Scots Proverbs (1776) affords adjectival examples, all suggesting an unfavourable meaning: “It is kittle to waken sleeping dogs. It is kittle shooting at corbies and clergy. It is kittle for the cheeks when the hurlbarrow gaes o'er the brig of the nose”. By contrast, John Galt in The Last of Lairds (1826) favours the sense of ‘apt’ in “Twa three bonny kittle words out o’ the dictioner”. This just proves what lexicographers know only too well: “Definitions in general..they are verie kittle in their strict lawes..and furnish als oft mater of contentioun as the light they promise” (David Calderwood’s History of the Kirk of Scotland, 1610).