Hint adj., rear, at the back
A Scots form of the English “hind”, hint forms part of many compounds.
Some of these refer to physical position, such as hin-hoch or hin haugh (a hind leg) or hin-door, which was the removable back-board of a box-cart.
This occurs in this quotation from Argyll (1932): “Aal at wance she [the mare] gied a lape farrat unknowinst tae Jock an’ he was cowpit oot richt ower the hin-dawr.” In shinty, a hin dool was a ball going over the goalline, which in turn gave rise to the expression to keep hin-dools, meaning to stop balls from doing so.
Hence the quotation “To use a youngster’s shinty phrase I’ll ‘kep hin-dools’”, from Alexander Fordyce’s A Country Weding (1818).
Other compounds are temporal, indicating later than. The hint harvest, or hin hairst, was the period after the harvest and before winter, as exemplified in this 1936 quotation from The Scotsman: “The ‘Hin Hairst’ feeing fair was observed at Cumnock yesterday”, and in this extract from the Kirkinner Kirk Session Records of 1713: “The guilt was committed in hind harvest in her own bed”.
The phrase hint-the-fire referred to a bench of forms all around the grate; something described as hintthe-han’ is being stored for future use, as illustrated by “Aw wat, it is a bare sair time . . . Less fowk hae something hint the han’” from John Milne’s Poems in the Aberdeenshire Dialect (1898).
On its own, hint can mean behind, as in this from John G Horne’s A Lan’wart Loon (1928): “For Tammy’s breeks were gapin’ ’hint ’im”.
Scots Word of the Week is written by Pauline Cairns Speitel of Scottish Language Dictionaries located at 9 Coates Crescent, Edinburgh.
Visit their website at www.scotsdictionaries.org.uk
You can also contact them by email at mail@scotsdictionaries.org.uk.
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