Scots Word of the Week: Flichter

A persistent language myth is that Eskimo languages have 100 words for ‘snow’. In fact, the languages of the Inuit of Greenland and Canada are agglutinative: one ‘word’ can be formed from a string of what, in English, would be different words. For instance, West Greenlandic siku ‘sea-ice’ is the root for sikuaq ‘newly-formed sea-ice’, but instead of saying ‘newly-formed sea-ice’, Inuits say something equivalent to ‘newlyformedseaice’.

Now Scots seems to have a lot of words associated with ‘ice’ and ‘snow’, ranging from the rather splendid bobantilter ‘icicle’, to nip-nebs ‘Jack Frost’ and tirl ‘a flurry of snow’. Flichter ‘snowflake’, today’s word, is one such. However, close attention to the Dictionaries of the Scots Language (https://dsl.ac.uk/) reveals that something more complex – and arguably more interesting – is going on in each case. Bobantilter (‘prob. a peculiar formation from bob …, to move up and down, and tilt, v., to tip up’) seems to have originally meant a dangling ornament like an earring; nip-nebs ‘pinch-noses’ is what Jack does; and tirl seems to have earlier meant ‘twirl’ (a word to which it is related). Flichter, related to flicht ‘flight’, was in Older Scots a verb, meaning ‘flutter’. Extra meanings followed: John Jamieson, the great early nineteenth-century lexicographer, records the word as meaning ‘a great number of small objects flying in the air; as a flichter of birds, a flichter of motes, etc’. Such citations demonstrate a common phenomenon in linguistic behaviour: extension in meaning, often through metaphorical/metonymic usage. Catherine Slater’s fictional servant Marget Pow, back in 1925, referred to how ‘the flichters are a’ over the house owin’ to the peat we’re usin’: snow wasn’t involved there!

Scots Word of the Week is written by Jeremy Smith, Professor of English Philology in the University of Glasgow.