CUTTIE adj short

Brushing up your Tam o’ Shanter recitation for Burns night makes cuttie sarks run in your mind. The dictionary defines cuttie as “short, stumpy, diminutive”, which makes me a cuttie quine. Certain combinations are particularly common, of which the best known is probably the cuttie pipe, the short-clay variety which we find in Sir Walter Scott’s Bride of Lammermuir (1819): “Not a gleed of fire, then, except the bit kindling peat, and maybe a spunk in Mysie’s cutty-pipe”. In this context it may be used as a noun, as in this example from Ramsay’s Proverbs (1737): “I'm no sae scant of clean pipes as to blaw wi’ a brunt cutty”. The cuttie knife was also commonly to be found about one’s person. J. S. Martin in Scottish Earth (1923) demonstrates its effectiveness in skilled hands: “Sax straks o’ his cuttie knife, A weet, sax chaps and syne The bark comes aff”. The adjective is often applied to that diminutive bird which makes a poetic appearance in The Bards of Galloway (1870): “Roun’ the craft o’ the Buchan, an’ a’ Causeyen’ We kent ilka haunt o’ the wee cutty-wren”. As an antidote to Strictly Come Dancing, we have this curiosity from Notes and Queries (1871): “There was an old dance called ‘Cutty Hunker Dance’, a burlesque on dancing. It was performed by two dancers, sometimes a woman crouching down to an almost sitting posture, leaning the body forward and grasping her knees tight with both arms, and then leaping from side to side all round the room in the most grotesque fashion imaginable”. Returning to the theme of cutlery, the cuttie spoon was a familiar item and it too could appear as a noun, recorded in an apt proverb for straitened times from J. Kelly’s 1721 collection: “It is better to sup with a Cutty, than want a Spoon”.

 Scots Word of the Week is written by Chris Robinson of Scottish Language Dictionaries