SCOTS WORD OF THE WEEK

GIFF-GAFF – give and take; tit for tat MEANING variously mutual help, give and take, tit for tat or fair exchange, a common use of giffgaff, according to the Dictionary of the Scots Language (www.dsl.ac. uk) was in this proverb, cited along with an explanation of its meaning in James Kelly’s A Complete Collection of Scottish Proverbs (1721): “Giff gaff makes good Fellowship. Mutual Obligations improve and continue Friendship”. It appears in Andrew Henderson’s Scottish Proverbs (1832): “Giff gaff maks gude friends.”

The give and take aspect is well illustrated by Scott in this quotation from Guy Mannering (1815): “I played at giff-gaff wi’ the officers; here a cargo ta’en – vera weel, that was their luck; – there another carried clean through, that was mine.” It also sometimes appears as separate words, as in: “in this world …the giffs and the gaffs nearly balance one another” from John Galt’s The Annals of the Parish (1821). Giff-gaff can also be used to mean repartee or banter, as in this from Gordon Fraser’s Wigtown and Whithorn (1877): “What giff-gaff an’ chaffin”, and this from Neil Munro’s The Daft Days (1907): “Talk about the repartee of salons! wit moves deliberately there compared with the swift giff-gaff that Kate and her lads were used to maintain.” There is also the adjective giff-gaffy, meaning communicative or familiar, as in “I ca’ him Prince, Johnnie, we’re that mighty cracky an’ giffgaffy thegither” from J C Snaith’s Fierceheart the Soldier (1897).

As a verb, giff-gaff means to barter or exchange things in a friendly way. Thus we read in John Strathesk’s Bits from Blinkbonny (1882): “‘We’ll giff-gaff’, handing his box to the tailor, and helping himself out of Kennedy’s dimpled … ovalshaped tin box”. SCOTS Word of the Week is written by Ann Ferguson of Scottish Language Dictionaries, www. scotsdictionaries.org.uk, mail@ scotsdictionaries.org.uk.