Camstairy adjective perverse, unmanageable
‘He grinned at her lifted eyebrow. “Quarrelsome Coccygodynians are camstairy by nature.”’ (Drums of Autumn)
Scots camstairy - along with variants such as camstary, camstrarie etc - is defined in The Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL) primarily as an adjective meaning ‘perverse, unmanageable, riotous’, but there are also derived usages as a noun ‘obstinate person’, and even as an adverb ‘helter-skelter, precipitately’. There are also forms to which suffixes like -ness and -ous have been added, such as camsterious ‘very frisky (of a horse)’, recorded in Caithness in 1934. The word and its derivatives were used across the Scots-speaking areas, and are still current, with an example recorded in verse by the prize-winning, Arbroath-born poet Raymond Vettese (1988):
‘Oor shred deceit:
we’re baith camsteery and, for me, I’m prood,
an’ that clock’s tick, gin it were a hairt-beat,
wad dootless hae doctors skartin their pows.’
Part of the word is thought to relate to steer or guide (from Old English stieran), but the derivation of cam- is uncertain. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that cam- derives from varieties of Celtic, citing (e.g.) Scottish Gaelic cam ‘crooked, bent, blind of one eye’.
DSL’s earliest citation (of campstarie) is from 1605, in a sonnet by Alexander Montgomery (d. 1598), a poet once much in favour with James VI. He was much cited by the king in his The Essayes of a Prentise in the Divine Arte of Poesie (1585) but later exiled for his Catholic beliefs. Then there is a gap until the eighteenth century, when the word appears in David Herd’s Ancient and Modern Scots Songs (1769), a publication much praised by Sir Walter Scott and now generally seen as a precursor for Robert Burns’ Scots Musical Museum (1787-1803). Modern scholarship has shown how Burns - now often perceived as a unique genius - was not in his time alone but was part of a vigorous antiquarian community that spanned the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Herd, who died around 1810, collected and curated what he regarded as a distinctively Scottish tradition of popular song, which he considered indicative of ‘the character, genius, taste and pursuits of a people’: a linking of culture and nationalism that became even more powerful with the emergence of the Romantic movement.