Coof noun a fool, a lout, a clown, a rustic
‘God, she couldn’t have! Could she? Yes, she bloody could, the reckless wee coof!’ (Drums of Autumn)
This is one of our splendidly insulting Scots words. William Thomson sums up a coof in Leddy May (1883): ‘the cuif wad be only a puir doitit sumph’, which weakly translates as ‘a poor, confused oaf’.
To the Scot, there are few greater follies than financial profligacy. As Allan Ramsay says in The Tea-Table Miscellany (1733): ‘Let coofs their cash be clinking’. A coof can be feckless - a bit of a knotless thread, as we say in Scotland. John Young described one in his poem My Big Jock (from a collection of poetry published in 1881): ‘An easy-osy thieveless coof, as soul-less as a rock’. ‘Thieveless’ means insipid or characterless, and it gives a good indication of what this poet meant by ‘coof’.
George Menzies in Poetical Trifles (1827) combines fusionlessness (a great word meaning wishy-washy) and stupidity: ‘The chiel, by Nature stamp’d a cuif, Wi’ smerghless [spiritless] saul an’ brainless roof’.
At best, someone described as a coof might just be lacking in formal education and indeed there is nothing derogatory intended by James Affleck in his Posthumous Poetical Works (1836): ‘The cuif that’s bred to pick and shool (shovel) Has mair auld farren (shrewdness, wisdom)’.
However, for several writers quoted in the Dictionaries of the Scots Language, a coof was lacking in courage, as we can deduce from the adjectives in these two examples. George Beattie writes in John o’ Arnha’ (1816): ‘For dastard coofs they dinna care’ and William Tennant in Papistry Storm’d (1827) gives us ‘Twa caitiff [miserable] cowart couffs!’.
Ellie McDonald in The Gangan Fuit (1991) echoes Hamlet: ‘Sic thochts mak cuiffies o us aa, an naitrel virr gangs blae wi thochts wad gar ye grue’. J G Horne in Flooer o’ the Ling (1936), however, rather seems to sympathise with the poor fellow who marries a woman with a bronchial cough: ‘Guid save the cuif that gets her tocher! He’ll need it a’ to staun’ her clocher’ [phlegmy cough].