Canny adjective wise, shrewd, knowing
‘“Verra canny, Sassenach,” Jamie said behind me, sounding amused.’ (A Breath of Snow and Ashes)
The word canny is familiar in the sense of careful and the admonition to ‘ca canny’ urges caution. ‘Donald’s Jamie poured two generous libations. “Canny”, cried Jonah. “I’ll go aground if I take all that”.’ (James Miller A Fine White Stoor, 1992).
Another meaning is skilful, demonstrated by this quotation from W T Dennison’s The Orcadian Sketchbook (1880) which in no way implies caution! ‘The officer wus canny eneuch at fencin’’.
Canny also means shrewd, particularly with money. Walter Scott uses it this way in Waverley (1814): ‘He recommended that some canny hand should be sent up the glens, to make the best bargain he could’.
Something or someone that is nae canny is ill-omened or unnatural. So, in W D Geddes’s Memorials of John Geddes 1797-1881, Cotties and his clan inspired dread by being ‘“nae jist a’ thegither canny”, and report had it that they had tried strange “cantraips” to obtain power over the invisible world’.
The canny-wife or canny-man was a good person to have around in such circumstances as they could effect miraculous cures, like this revival of a collapsed horse described in Transactions of the Banffshire Field Club (1890): ‘The “canny woman” of the district was sent for. She then took hold of the lower corners of her apron and gave it a flap in the animal’s face. Up it jumped as fresh as if nothing had been the matter’. The cannywife might also deliver babies.
Our first record is from 1592 in a letter by David Forster: ‘Much better is it to have abiddin a cannie mercat, nor to have hazarded an old gloyd [a worn out horse]’. It may come from the Older Scots noun ‘can’ meaning skill or knowledge.
The origin of canny is uncertain, but it is thought to derive from the verb can in the sense ‘to be able’, from which we also get the northern Scots noun can, meaning ‘knowledge, skill or ability’. It is also possible that Old Norse kunnigr ‘versed in magic art’ had some influence upon the range of meanings of canny.