Words, cats a compelling combination
Ilove the quirkiness of local dialects. Which might be a bit like saying I love not being able to understand what on earth people are saying, but it’s not that at all.
Ok, it is to a small degree, because my weird, word-addicted brain enjoys the challenge of deciphering exactly what an expression might mean, but the fascinating origins of some of these linguistic oddities interest me more.
In one sense, I’ve already had to adapt to a new ‘dialect’ in moving to New Zealand. I mean, no-one says ‘‘a wee bit’’ in South Africa, but now I say it all the time. Moving to the South Island probably ingrained that.
On the other hand, discovering Kiwis say ‘‘Yeah … nah’’ is quite comforting, coming from a country where ‘‘ja nee’’ (yar neer) is a common Afrikaans expression. I think it even has roughly the same meaning.
On my first weekend in New Zealand, 19 years ago, five of us, South African cricket journalists, pulled into Dunedin some time after 8pm with no idea where our hotel was. There was a one-day international on at Carisbrook the next day and we’d travelled from Alexandra, where that day’s warm-up match had finished a few hours earlier.
Fortunately a young man on the forecourt of a garage was able to point us in what he was reasonably sure was the right direction when we gave him the hotel’s name.
‘‘Give it a nudge,’’ he threw in as he waved us off, introducing us to a (possibly localised) Kiwiism we hadn’t yet encountered in three or four days on New Zealand soil.
To be fair, though, none of these bits of Kiwi vernacular are really what I’m thinking of when I talk of a dialect. Largely using words most of the English-speaking world does, though perhaps not in quite the same formations, they’re not hard for outsiders to understand.
I think our Dunedin rescuer might be far more confused, for example, if he landed in Johannesburg and heard people talking a lot about robots. I hadn’t figured out until some time after leaving the Republic that Saffers are apparently the only people who use that word for traffic lights, and I have no idea how it came about. It’s properly weird, to be honest.
Dialects have been on my mind this week because of a wonderful old Scots word a friend shared on Twitter, cuttycrumbing.
Now unless you’ve specifically heard that before, or you’re linguistics expert Susie Dent, I suspect you’ll have no idea what it means. It’s not a well-known word, though it has a couple of words in it, and that’s the kind of word I love discovering.
It’s described as ‘‘an old Scots dialect word for the purring of a cat’’ and that’s another major attraction of the term, which was also shared with several other ailurophiles, but there’s precious little purrtinent information online about its origins, which makes me think it had fairly localised usage. An 1823 work by John Galt, The Spaewife (a Scots term for a woman fortune-teller), contains the phrase ‘‘to sing cuttycrumb’’, but that’s all I’ve discovered.
The word’s discovery quickly put me in mind of a young ginger fellow who arrived here out of the blue nearly 14 months ago and hasn’t left.
The first things to strike us about him were his luxuriant, foxcoloured fur and his idling tractor purr. Not much has changed.
As I contemplated cuttycrumbing, I imagined it being coined of a cat just like him.
We’ve just finished watching, on Netflix, both seasons of the brilliant detective series Shetland, and I became fascinated by the remote islands, not much further from the west coast of Norway, which they once belonged to, than they are from the north of Scotland.
Somehow the thought of Viking raiders like Eric the Red hanging around those parts had me imagining the Shetlands might be home to a few cats like Loki, with his appropriately Norse name, though I have no evidence to confirm that, or indeed any insight into the area’s feline gene pool.
The other possibility raised was that there might be a purring dialect, a fascinating suggestion I don’t have a conclusive answer to.
It’s fairly clear, though, that cats don’t purr only as a sign of contentment, though cuttycrumbing somehow strikes me as reflecting that part of the feline lexicon.
I’m pretty sure the series The Secret Life of Cats, which aired here last year, suggested most sounds cats make are to communicate with humans, rather than each other, so it’s logical purring would be a multipurpose tool.
One reference I found, at pets.thenest.com, suggested cats sometimes purr for the same reason humans take deep breaths, to calm themselves down, which would help explain why some purr when unhappy, or about to bite.
I’ve also experienced, on several occasions, the almost amorous nature of the highpitched purr cats put on when they decide, just for a few minutes, that you’re the best thing since sliced bread, catnip on legs. It never lasts.
Ultimately, the word remains a bit of a mystery, but I’m happy to say I came across some Scots companions for it.
Firstly there’s huffle-buffs, ‘‘an old Scots dialect word for worn out, comfortable clothes’’, which sounds like just what you’d want to wear with a cat cuttycrumbing on your lap, and then, just as aptly, there’s kreesal, found at mentalfloss.com, which is what some Scots called the ball a cat or dog curls up in to sleep. It’s ‘‘derived from an earlier word, kreeso, for an untidy bundle of clothes or anything else’’.
See, there are connections everywhere.
Aren’t words wonderful? Even those we don’t [fully] understand.