Cloot noun a piece of cloth
‘“Well, I havena yet met a lassie named Sobriety or Fortitude,” he said mildly. “The wean’s sopping; have ye a clean clootie for her?”’ (Written in my own Heart’s Blood)
Cloot or clout (rhymes with hoot) means a cloth, rag, dishcloth, duster, bandage, baby’s nappy (or diaper), patch or garment. It is this last sense that is meant in the well-known saw, ‘Neer cast a cloot till mey be oot’, recommending that you do not remove your winter semmit (vest) until the hawthorn, or may, is in flower. You may occasionally see a hawthorn bush with a lot of cloots tied on to it. That will be a fairy bush and each of the rags represents a wish.
The earliest literary reference we have for it being used to mean dishcloth comes from around 1590 in the poems of John Stewart of Baldynneis: ‘Tak thair ane quheis (blow) yit (again) vith my skoullon clout’, which might be paraphrased in modern Scots as ‘tak anither skelp with my dishcloth’.
The sense of nappy appears in James Hogg’s Shepherd’s Calendar (1829): ‘Shame fa’ my stupidity! thought I to mysell. Is the haill terrible affair endit in a bichel o’ baby-clouts?’
Cloot often appears as a verb in the sense of to patch. That is how it is used here in J B Salmond’s My Man Sandy (1899): ‘They’re scarce o’ cloots that mend their hose wi’ dockens’. Dockens technically means dock leaf, but can also be used the same way fig is in English (in not giving a fig), as here from James Robertson’s The Fanatic (2000): ‘Combing his locks and preening himself, and brushing out his finery as if God would care a docken what he looked like when He cast him into the furnace.’
Back to cloth, the compound ‘clip cloots’ is a term for a person with a sharp tongue, sharp enough to cut cloth.
Another cloth usage with which many Scots will be familiar is ‘clootie dumpling’, a birthday treat of spicy fruitcake mixture boiled in a cloot. If you didn’t eat it all at one go, you could have it fried for breakfast.