Blatherskite noun a foolish person, a babbler
‘… the King had somehow happened to see the plates of the “Womb” section and had ordered those pages to be torn out of the book, the ignorant German blatherskite!’ (An Echo in the Bone)
Linguists - quite rightly - reject the view that languages have intrinsic qualities; a notion that can easily fall into crude stereotyping. Even so, Scots is blessed with a rich lexicon of insult, including numerous terms denoting stupid people, ranging from beffan (not only stupid, but also fat) found in Banffshire through Roxburghshire’s mell-heid and snoddie, to yaup, found in Angus and Fife.
One such Scots word is blatherskite: ‘a silly foolish person; a babbler’, ‘a boaster’. This word, along with several variant forms, such as bladderskate, bletherumskite and bletheran skate, is still widely used, as witnessed by Liz Lochhead’s translation of Moliere’s Tartuffe (1985): ‘You brassnecked neb you, ya bletheranskite’. According to the Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL), blather, related to blether, seems to derive from Old Norse blaðra ‘utter inarticulately’, while ‘skate, the name of a fish, and skite, squirt out, are both used opprobriously’.
DSL’s earliest citation is from the song Maggie Lauder: ‘Jog on your gait, ye bletherskate’. This poem, which seems to have originally circulated in a loose-leaf ‘broadside’ format with accompanying music, is usually ascribed to Francis Sempill (d.1682) of Beltrees (near Lochwinnoch), a wit of the period and enthusiastic supporter of the Stuarts.
Maggie Lauder had a very considerable afterlife, a version being incorporated into Allan Ramsay’s play The Gentle Shepherd (1725), and even seems to have ‘gone global’. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the song ‘became a favourite ditty in the American camp during the War of Independence’.
The New York Tribune, in 1861, used the word as a noun to refer to foolish talk, and it is probably from American English that Colin Wilson in The Outsider (1956), a cult book of the time, derived the term: ‘For Nietzsche ... there is no such thing as abstract knowledge; there is only useful knowledge and unprofitable blatherskite.’
Both DSL and OED cite Irish sources for the word, and DSL provides Ulster citations from the 1920s, including a verb meaning to caper: ‘don't be blatherskatin' roun' that Ring the way you would roun’ the junction on a Saturday night!’