Huckle meaning to remove forcibly, to be arrested by police is perhaps connected with hochle ‘to walk with a slow, awkward, hobbling or tottering gait’ in the Dictionary of the Scots Language  (www.dsl.ac.uk).

This word with this meaning is perfectly familiar to me but Scottish Language Dictionaries’ earliest example is a terse oral one: “huckle, to arrest” from a Glasgow Sherriff in 1989.

The earliest written citation we have comes from a Scott Robinson review in the Sunday Mail of 16th February 1997: “One teenage tosser on Blues And Twos, nicked for a horrendous catalogue of offences, was being huckled into a police car when he wailed: “Ah want me mother!”; From big villain to big jessie in a oner.”

Next written source is from a James Kelman short story Gardens go on forever, in The Good Times from 1999: “Ye want to have seen it but they were rampaging. They tore up that fountain at Trafalgar Square, …halfwits, nay point getting huckled for nothing know what I mean, if ye’re no earning a few quid?”

Helen Martin, writing in the Evening News of 10th September 2001 discusses the waywardness of children: “We hope that a nice, friendly, mature policeman with sons of his own will scoop them up, huckle them off to the clink, frighten the wits out of them and tell us to come and collect them.”

Finally, not only do the ‘polis’ huckle. Alison Craig writes in the Sunday Mail of 28th January 2007: “My dog has fleas. Flora is scratching like a fiend and needs to be deloused; I huckle her under my oxter to the shower cubicle.”

Scots Word of the Week is written by Pauline Cairns Speitel of Scottish Language Dictionaries 9 Coates Crescent, Edinburgh EH3 7AL (0131) 220 1294,  www.scotsdictionaries.org.uk,  mail@scotsdictionaries.org.uk.

Huckle has been selected for inclusion in the new edition of the Concise Scots Dictionary ‘CSD2’. This definitive, single-volume dictionary of Scots will be published by Edinburgh University Press at the end of October. Fully updated with fascinating insights, CSD2 will be  indispensable to anyone interested in the rich heritage of the Scots language.