Clishmaclaver noun idle talk, gossip, chatter
‘“He sat rolled up in the corner like a hedgehog, all through the clishmaclaver.”’ (Dragonfly in Amber)
Dictionaries of the Scots Language defines the senses of this word as: ‘Idle talk, gossip; wordy discourse; a talkative busybody; to gossip, chatter’.
One of our earliest citations comes in the form of a poem by Allan Ramsay (1798). Here he is giving some romantic advice on how to avoid a conflict with your partner: ‘If e’er she tak the pet, or fret, Be calm, and yet maintain your state; And smiling, ca’ her little foolie, Syne with a kiss evite a toolie [avoid a quarrel]. This method’s ever thought the braver, Than either cuffs, or clish-ma-claver’. Ramsay means talk here, but Burns uses the gossip sense in this letter from 1794: ‘(Now don’t put any of your squinting construction on this, or have any clishmaclavers with our acquaintances) - I assure you that to my lovely Friend you are indebted for many of your best songs of mine.’ And in 1917, the Reverend T Whyte Paterson (in his Wyse-Sayins o Solomon) remarks about a busybody that: ‘The clitter-clatters o’ a clishmaclaiver are unco gustie [enjoyable] till him’.
Later in the twentieth century, Sam Hanna Bell, the Northern Irish author, records: ‘Let me insense ye how matters are on that head, for it’s better coming from the factor [landlord] than any clishmaclaver you’ll hear in other quarters…’ A fairly stern warning not to listen to gossip from his 1987 novel Across the Narrow Sea.
The Montrose Review of November 2000 comments humorously on a former contributor to the Review: ‘And warming to the theme of town councillors, many of you will have fond memories of the original Gable Ender ... journalist, diarist and a gossiping kind of loon - a glib-gabbit clashie and nemsie with a rare North Eastern interest in the clishmaclaver o’ the toun’. A ‘Gable Ender’, by the way, is a nickname for a resident of Montrose.
Finally, there’s a later example (2011) where Tom Hubbard uses the word in his translation into Scots of Ukrainian poet Mykhailo Drai-Khmara’s Scheherazade: ‘I doot I’ll hear the lave [rest] o fond Scheherazaddie’s clishmaclavers.’