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Scots Word for April

Slap

slap for sheep; borrowed from the Skipton, Yorkshire tourist website, click to visit
No, this is not a violent assault with the open palm! In Scots, it is a gap, breach or hole (in a wall, etc.). Its best known literary use is Burns' description of Tam o Shanter's route home via 'mosses, waters, slaps and styles'. From the ability of sheep and other animals to find the gap in the wall or fence, it is easy to see how the meaning extended to an entrance or exit. On a larger scale, it is used to refer to a hill pass, such as the Cauld Stane Slap through the Pentlands. On a small scale, a quotation from The Book of Dunvegan shows it can be used to refer to piercings in shoes: 'Shoes leased with slopes.' Sir Gilbert Hay's Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour (1619) gruesomely describes an injury involving 'a slop so wide That all his bowellis hang furth'. A further military use comes from A. Dawson in Rambling Recollections (1868): 'These triumphs made many slaps in the ranks of the regiment'.

A more specialised use is found in salmon fishing; a slap was the gap or open space temporarily left in a salmon weir to allow fish to swim up the river to the spawning-ground unhindered. Specifically, the Saturday Slap is the period from Saturday night till Monday morning, fixed by law for the free passage of fish up a river. For the rest of the week, fishermen were allowed to catch the salmon in cruives (wicker salmon traps).

Finally, an application reminiscent of Chaucer's Wife of Bath shows that the association between being 'gat-toothed' and having a healthy sexual appetite was still current in 1970 when The Scottish National Dictionary Association added, 'She hasna that slappie atween the teeth for naething' to their oral collection.

The Scots column is written by Christine Robinson. You can contact her with any questions.