Bawbee noun a coin
‘“But perhaps ye could be tellin’ me whether this wee bawbee is from Kenny’s coat?”’ (Drums of Autumn)
The bawbee has a long history as a form of currency in Scotland. It started off being significant in value but ended up denoting tokens. Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL) tells us that the likely source of the name was: ‘apparently a shortening of Sillebawbe, the territorial designation of Alexander Orrok [Laird of Sillebawby], appointed master of the mint in 1538’. The coin was originally silver and had the value of ‘three, and subsequently of six pennies Scots’. By 1553 the Lanark Burgh Records contained the following extract: ‘He wantit na mair mony nor tua crounis of weycht and tua bawbeis’.
The bawbee’s value changed in the eighteenth century to be worth a halfpenny. In 1703, the Account Book of Sir John Foulis gives the following example in the context of halfpenny loaf: ‘For a chopin eall [ale] and a babie [bawbee] loafe ...’.
In My First Bawbee (1868), Archibald McKay tells the tale of how a wee boy disregarded his grandmother’s sage advice and lucklessly lost his first bawbee at a fair stall: ‘Thinks I, this is the vera thing, I’ll mak’ my bawbee twa … But hope was dung aglee – A blank was mine, and sae I lost My first bawbee.’ He learned the lesson that’ if ye ken the richt side of a bawbee’ you are ‘sharp and shrewd in money matters’.
Later, the term came to mean money in general, with an early example coming from Glasgow in A G Murdoch’s 1879 Rhymes and Lyrics: ‘My second man … Had twa-three bawbees in the bank’. This sense was still current in the late twentieth century, as demonstrated in this football reference from the Herald of May 1989: ‘If you will invest only a few of Nike’s considerable bawbees (the Scottish equivalent of ecus) in the Blue Brazil [Cowdenbeath football team] your symbolic gesture for youth development will provide a lead for the authorities, and will put a smile on the face of Scottish football’.
Bawbee means small change now: ‘But Scottish football is totally different: there is no cash cow called “live TV” with its hundreds of millions to be poured in. Scottish football is dealing in relative bawbees.’ (The Times, September 2020.) And from ‘small change’ it’s a small step to button or buttons, as in the reference to Kenny’s coat.