Old Norse ‘kalla' gives ‘call', meaning shout, cry out or summon. This can cause confusion for non-Scots speakers when they hear the Burns' song “Ca' the yowes to the knowes”. There is no shepherd sitting on a grassy knoll shouting “Here, sheep!” because Burns is using a Scots sense which appeared in the fourteenth century when John Barbour tells us “Bwnnok … callit his wayn towart the peill”. Several quotations involve carts. From the early sixteenth century, we see it used of nails as in Robert Pitcairn's Ancient Criminal Trials (1601): “He stuid up … besyde the said gibbet, and cald ane naill thairin”. This sense of hammering produced the contemptuous phrase “Bile your heid an' ca' tackets in't”. Livestock are driven with varying degrees of difficulty. “It's easy ca'in the dyeuks to the mill-dam” writes William Alexander in Sketches of Life among my Ain Folk (1875), but managing people is harder. A. Laing writes in Whistle-Binkie in the nineteenth century, “My father wad lead wi' a bairn, But wadn be ca'd for the de'il”. John Erskine notes in his Diary (1686) “Several times I did see one man both holding the plough and cawing, and one ox drawing”. Further light is thrown on this observation in W. MacDowall's An Introduction to the History of Dumfries (1867): “Yoking ten strapping sons in a plough, he held it himself, whilst his youngest boy acted as “caller'”. This was the boy or girl who guided and urged forward the plough horses. These children would have been happier cawin a gird or a skipping rope. If you ‘ca yer ain gird', you go your own way or get on with your own work. You just keep ‘caain awa at it', and if people call you names, a good riposte is ‘Ye can caw me whit ye like as lang as ye dinnae caw me ower'.

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