Crabbit adjective bad tempered, cross, irritable
‘“He’s too crabbit to fight himself, but he’ll see his nephews come and spread the word …”’ (The Fiery Cross)
The very sound of crabbit, with its plosive beginning, middle and end, conveys a sense of brusqueness and irritability. Examples of the word’s use still abound in media sources. In August 2022, for example, the Dundee Courier ran a report from a man suffering the effects of his own snoring: ‘I’d go to bed and read my Kindle then the next thing it would hit me on the face as I’d fallen asleep with it in my hand. I was also getting up three or four times a night too. I was angry all the time, just crabbit at the world’.
Scottish writers have been describing people as crabbit since the Middle Ages, and the word is found in very early Scots texts, including Legends of the Saints (c.1400): ‘Sume men sais he crabyt is.’ Crabbit is the Scots equivalent of English crabbed, which also first appears on record in the fourteenth century to describe angry, ill-tempered or spiteful people. Both words are derived from the crab, on account of the creature’s nippy characteristics.
Published in 1862, the word pops up in Alexander Hislop’s Proverbs: ‘He that’s crabbit without cause should mease [calm down] without amends’. Way ahead of him, though, Robert Burns had a solution for feeling crabbit. In 1785, he declares in his poem Scotch Drink: ‘Let other poets raise a fracas, ‘Bout vines, an’ wines, an’ drucken Bacchus, An’ crabbit names an’ stories wrack us, An’ grate our lug: I sing the juice Scotch bear [barley] can mak us, In glass or jug’. Good Scottish beer will do the trick.
Although most usually used of living things, crabbit can describe weather, as here in Poems (1826) by Andrew Scott: ‘Aft hae I thought fate meant to kill us a’, Whan crabbit north winds fling the drivin’ snaw’.
And as for technology, haven’t we all been here: ‘Java 5 had been crabbit aw moarnan. The thirty year auld navigation system hadnae waantit tae budge fae its energy poke.’ (Matthew Fitt, But n Ben A-Go-Go, 2000.)