Scots Word of the Week: hirple
Dictionaries of the Scots Language defines this as “to walk slowly and painfully or with a limp, to hobble; to move unevenly, as a hare”.
Margaret Calderwood recorded this uncomfortable departure in A Journey in England, Holland etc. (1756): “He hirpled round to all the company, and wished them good-night".
Moving perhaps not so swiftly on, this comes from Robert Fergusson’s poem Leith Races (1773): “Great feck gae hirpling hame like fools, The cripple lead the blind”. Clearly a good time was had.
In her 1952 novel with the intriguing title Lobsters on the Agenda, Naomi Mitchison wrote: “I’ve seen him often enough hirplin’ round, him and his stick”. And later hirple appears in Sheena Blackhall’s Wittgenstein’s Web (1996): “Ah, bit the meenister hidna seen (or mebbe he hid but chuse nae tae notice) auld Bunty Strachan hirplin up an doon stairs frae her mither’s bedroom ...”.
In 2017, Sheila McNab wrote to the Sunday Post (Dundee): “In his Word On The Words column, Steve Finan states: ‘Nothing rhymes with month, orange, silver or purple.’ I beg to differ – the Scottish word hirple rhymes perfectly with purple. I remember hearing my Scottish grandmother use the word from my Glasgow school days.”
The word is still in use. John Nicolson recorded in the Alloa and Hillfoots Advertiser of February 2023: “Some of you may have noticed that when I’m out and about I’m hirplin a bit. And for the last few weeks, I’ve been using a stick. I have succumbed to that widespread Scottish curse, arthritis”.
Scots Word of the Week comes from Dictionaries of the Scots Language.
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