This is a weekend for thinking about mithers and those female parents by marriage that are referred to in A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue as eldmoders or gudmoders. This dictionary records mixed relationships with mothers-in-law. A Diurnal of Remarkable Occurrents, that have Passed within the Country of Scotland since the Death of King James the Fourth, till the Year 1575 tells how “Alexr Cant … was slane in the nycht … be his seruand and his guidmoder”. However, a dutiful son-in-law in Edinburgh Testaments (1597) leaves “to my guidmother alsmeikle fyne frenche blak as wilbe hir ane paitlote”, or enough fabric to make a garment for her neck and chest. The dictionary provides wide-ranging motherly information. A clocksmidder is a hen with chicks. Ominously, a midder bag is the bag of instruments carried by a doctor attending a birth. Just as well, then, to know about mothering stones. The Scots Magazine (1948) explains: “‘Mothering stones' ... were thought to confer human fertility or to ease the course of child-bearing”. The mother-hill is the land on which a sheep grazed with its mother. A motherie is a small delicately-coloured shell probably named from mother-of-pearl. The mither's pet is the youngest child of a family and Mother's Questions is a simplified form of the Shorter Catechism, compiled in 1731. A moder-sook is a shoreward current by which seamen steered towards the shore in bad visibility before the marine compass. And, strangely, a Musket's mother was used by Highlanders to mean cannon, as in this quotation from The Letters and Journals of Robert Baillie (1639): “Some great ordinance we had, which moved our partie to hold off when they were coming on hoping to have cleane defeate us; for their Heiland men avowed they could not abyde the musquet's mother, and so fled in troupes at the first voley”.

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