SCOTS OF THE WEEK

HODDLE

Words change their meanings, over time, in many ways. Sometimes they specialise, so that “fowls” – once meaning all kinds of birds – now refers to the barnyard variety; sometimes they turn into something nastier, like “crafty”, which once meant “skilful” but now means “cunning, underhand”.

The history of today’s word, hoddle, and its meanings, as illustrated in the Dictionary of the Scots language (www.dsl.ac.uk), exemplifies well such complex processes of semantic change. According to DSL, hoddle’s primary meaning is”to waddle, to move with an uneven hobbling gait”, and there are some amusing derived forms; the term hodler, for instance, “one who hoddles”, is “specifically applied to one of the participants in the baking of cakes for St Luke’s Fair at Rutherglen, perhaps from the motion of the body in kneading”. The eighteenth-century citation refers to the hodler’s accomplice, apparently called a todler. And a hodlemakenster is a skirt that “because of its tightness or cut”’ causes a woman to hoddle. Hoddle can also be a noun, meaning”’a waddling gait, and there is even another 18th-century citation that seems to indicate that the word can be used to mean “sexual intercourse”: ‘Ta’en ane anithers word, a kiss, and a hoddle, at the hillock side’.

Hoddle seems to derive from an older verb hod, meaning “to jog along on horseback”. Yet another meaning for hoddle, apparently restricted to the Scottish Borders, is “a loosely built hayrick”.

Scots Word of the Week is written by Professor Jeremy Smith on behalf of Scottish Language Dictionaries. 9 Coates Crescent, Edinburgh

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