Cutty adjective short
‘… his hand carried on with its machinations, having now moved under my buckskin shirt and found its way beneath the cutty sark as well.’ (Drums of Autumn)
Brushing up your Tam o Shanter recitation for Burns night will have cutty sarks reeling in your imagination, as indeed they probably did for Burns. Tam, of course, gives himself away to the ‘hellish legion’ of reeling witches by shouting out his admiration for their revealing short shifts: ‘“Weel done, Cutty-sark!” And in an instant all was dark…’
Somewhat known for his love of the ladies, Burns was hauled up for fornication before the Kirk. That practice was evidently still going strong in 1881 when this report appeared in the Aberdeen Evening Express: ‘… and for more flagrant sins the offenders were summoned before the kirk-session and punished - the females by having to sit upon what was called the “cutty stool”’.
Certain combinations are particularly common, of which probably the best known is the cutty pipe, the short-clay variety which we find in Sir Walter Scott’s Bride of Lammermoor (1819): ‘Not a gleed of fire, then, except the bit kindling peat, and maybe a spunk in Mysie’s cutty-pipe’. In this context it may be used as a noun, as in this example from Ramsay’s Proverbs (1737): ‘I’m no sae scant of clean pipes as to blaw wi’ a brunt cutty’.
A cutty knife was a common bit of kit to have about your person. John S Martin, in Scottish Earth (1923), describes its effectiveness in skilled hands: ‘Sax straks o’ his cuttie knife, A weet, sax chaps and syne The bark comes aff’.
The adjective is often applied to that diminutive bird which makes a poetic appearance in The Bards of Galloway (1870): ‘Roun’ the craft o’ the Buchan, an’ a’ Causeyen’ We kent ilka haunt o’ the wee cutty-wren’.
Finally, we have this curiosity from Notes and Queries (1871): ‘There was an old dance called “Cutty Hunker Dance”, a burlesque on dancing. It was performed by two dancers, sometimes a woman crouching down to an almost sitting posture, leaning the body forward and grasping her knees tight with both arms, and then leaping from side to side all round the room in the most grotesque fashion imaginable’.