LIFT

FOR obvious reasons I – like many other people – have spent much time indoors recently, looking out, rather wistfully, at the same bit of sky. But a small plus is that it has given me the idea for today’s word: lift (sometimes spelt luft, luift).

Lift is possibly the most common word in Scots for ‘sky’. It appears alongside rarer, figurative uses of words such as carry – a north-eastern usage that can also mean ‘motion of the clouds’ -- and pen or pend (which more usually means archway or canopy). Lift derives from Old Northumbrian, the variety spoken across northern England and southern Scotland before the present Scottish/English border emerged, and is related to German luft, Dutch lucht, and Old Norse lopt. The form was originally found in other English dialects, but seems to have died out in most of England by the end of the 14th century; the great dialectologist Joseph Wright, at the end of the 19th century, recorded the word in Yorkshire, Northumberland, and what is now Cumbria.

Lift has quite a history. There are numerous citations in the Dictionaries of the Scots Language (www.dsl.ac.uk), beginning with one from the very first literary work in Scots, John Barbour’s The Bruce, in the late fourteenth century. It seems mostly to have been a poetical word and commonly deployed in proverbs. The well-named Complaynt of Scotland, which appeared in 1549 as part of a pamphlet war between Scotland and England during Henry VIII’s ‘rough wooing’, refers to how ‘The lyft did rane yrn’: a rather evocative analogy.

The Doric poet Sheena Blackhall referred in 2000 to ‘a flicht o greylags ben the lift’: a beautiful image that we earthbound – and housebound -- humans might like to ponder on.

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