Scots word of the week

SOUK

YESTERDAY was St Magnus Day, patron saint of Orkney, which put me in mind of this week’s word, writes JEREMY SMITH. Ever since Scotland emerged at the end of what scholars no longer call “the Dark Ages”, it has been a multilingual nation. A timetraveller visiting what is now Scotland around the year 1000 would encounter speakers of Old Northumbrian in the south-east, of Celtic varieties across large swathes of the country, and of Old Norse (Norroen or “Norn”), the language of the Vikings, in the far north. Shetland and Orkney, in particular, were settled by many Norse speakers. Today’s Orkney Scots retains many Norn-derived forms. One such word is souk.

According to the Dictionaries of the Scots Language (www.dsl.ac. uk), souk/sook has several meanings, many of them derived from the Old English verb s can “suck”; a sook is an evocative Scots word for a toady, for instance. However, the word found in Orkney and Shetland seems to have a distinct etymology, being traced to the Old Norse noun súgr “drying wind”. The antiquarian and geologist Samuel Hibbert, in his Description of the Shetland Isles (1822), referred to a “semiputrescent” local delicacy, viz. “souked fish”, which seems – according to a 1960s citation – to have developed special properties: “Sookit skate (muckle toucht o as an aphrodisiac )”. Hugh Marwick, whose 1929 study of Orkney usage remains foundational, offers a less startling citation: “It’s makan a bonnie sook the day”, i.e. it’s a good drying day.