Canty adjective lively, cheerful, pleasant
‘… for Angus Og MacLeod was a canty lad, and much liked…’ (The Fiery Cross)
Canty is a lovely, cheery Scots word meaning cheerful and pleasant, though we do also find the occasional less attractive usage. For example, cantie-smatchet is a term for a louse, apparently from the liveliness of its motion. A very odd simile, also involving an obnoxious creature, is provided by Alexander Ross in Helenore (1768): ‘Now Lindy is as canty as a midge’. Presumably, this too refers more to the midge’s liveliness than to its emotional state.
Food, drink and convivial company are frequently associated with cantiness. Samuel R Crockett makes noses twitch and tastebuds tingle in The Raiders (1894) with: ‘the canty smell of the oatmeal fried among it [bacon]’. And Allan Ramsay, in Poems of 1721, is equally content with hamely fare: ‘Of Lang-kail I can make a Feast, And cantily had up my Crest, And laugh at Dishes rare’.
Alexander Pennecuik, in Streams from Helicon (1720), adds to general cantiness the effects of alcohol: ‘where they sauld Brandy and Ale, And the King was turn’d kanty with the other Gill’. For Violet Jacob, though, in Songs of Angus (1915), good company will suffice: ‘And, nicht by nicht, we will a’ convene And we’ll be a cantie three’.
The companionship of marriage is often described as cantie. Burns’ Duncan Gray (1792) and the reluctant Meg end up ‘crouse and cantie baith’, and an Aberdeenshire speaker told one of our dictionary researchers in 1938 that ‘She got a gey canty doonsit’ meant ‘she made a fortunate marriage’.
Perhaps unexpectedly, Charles Dickens used this word in Pickwick Papers (1837), albeit in relation to Scots: ‘Three or four ... canty old Scotch fellows’. And it appears nostalgically about past time in Burns’ ‘John Anderson, my jo, John, We clamb the hill the gither; And mony a canty day, John, We've had wi' ane anither: Now we maun totter down, John, And hand in hand we'll go, And sleep the gither at the foot, John Anderson, my Jo.’ (1789)
There is an Older Scots word ‘cant’ meaning brisk or lively. The origins of both words are obscure but ‘kant’ and ‘kanty’ in Low German have similar meanings and ancient trade connections may have brought these words to Scotland.