The house sparrow has a number of names in Scots, all starting off the same way but with numerous different endings. Perhaps the commonest are spug and speug with their diminutive forms spuggie and speuggie. We also have sprug with an ‘r’ added and, as often happens with ‘r’, we have another form where the ‘r’ has jumped the vowel to give spurg. We also have spur, spurdie and sprauch. This last appears in Blackwood’s Magazine (1828): “Their numbers ... seemed to justify the humanest of boys in killing any quantity of sprauchs. ... You had but to fling a stone into any stack-yard, and up rose a sprauch-shower”. Numbers seem to have diminished greatly in some places since then. Their small size and vulnerability features in several dictionary quotations. R. Trotter in Galloway Gossip (1901) writes of “A puir aul’ peeferin sp’yag”. The feebleness of the young bird is alliteratively evoked in Modern Scottish Poets VI (1883) edited by D. H. Edwards: “Wee flitt’rin, flecht’rin, half-fledged spurdie”. The tiny appetite of the bird provides a simile for an 1875 poem by A. L. Orr: “They couldna save as much as feed a spug”. Hence, spug and its variants are used figuratively of feeble, slender or insignificant people providing a well-expressed aphorism in W. P. Milne’s Eppie Elrick (1955): “Spurgie-hocht mennies dinna set ’e kilt”. These wee birds have other qualities though. Little, lively people are likened to them and their courage is recognised in this metaphor from J. Carruthers in A Man Beset (1927): “Andrew was ‘a tifty speug’ – and fought hard”. Gregarious birds in literature as in life, they often appear in lists of species. W. N. Herbert in The New Makars (ed Tom Hubbard, 1991) itemises: “hoodie craws, an doos, an speugies, an heckil-breistit thrushis”; Scots is manifestly rich in avian vocabulary.

Scots Word of the Week is written by Chris Robinson of Scottish Language Dictionaries.

This week's Word is spoken by Chris Rollie of the RSPB.