Daftie noun a foolish person
‘“It would take a real daftie to forget that, Sassenach,” he said. “I may be lacking practice, but I havena lost all my faculties yet.”’ (Voyager)
An early record of the word daftie (with the meaning of fool) comes from 1870 in Charles Gibbon’s For the King: ‘The Daftie still maintained his position’.
However, there is an earlier example from the Stonehaven Journal of May 1867: ‘Two notorious pickpockets David Sutherland … and William Strachan or McDonald, alias “Daftie”, are in custody here’. Why William had the alias of daftie is not recorded - perhaps because he kept getting caught.
The original meaning of daftie was offensive and it is still used as a term of mockery or belittlement. An example of this comes from the Aberdeen Evening Express of November 2021 on the workings of Aberdeen City Council: ‘I never thought I would say this, but I agree with Aberdeen city councillor Marie Boulton. Last week she resigned as “masterplan lead” - a hoot of a daftie title that hopefully will be permanently dumped...’
In a similar vein, in the letters page of the Daily Record of January 2022, one correspondent wrote: ‘What a daftie reader John Smith from Falkirk is.’ He might have been in good company though. A report from the Aberdeen Press and Journal in 1931 stated: ‘Known as “Dafty” by his school fellows, Professor James Clerk Maxwell … became a leading authority on electricity and magnetism, and was the first holder of the Professorship of Experimental Physics at Cambridge … About the middle of his school career, however, he surprised his companions by suddenly becoming one of the most brilliant among them.’ Be careful who you call a daftie …
Perhaps Clerk Maxwell, in his youth, could have been seen as daft in the sense of daft days (a time of frivolity and merriment, extended to mean youth). In A Pilgrimage to the Land of Burns (1822), author Hew Ainslie asks: ‘... did ye see ony body frae the lan’ o’ your daft days, Saunders?’.
In more recent times, daftie is also used almost as a term of endearment: ‘Aldo scowls at ma reaction “Listen, ya dafties. That bunch ae Stephen Hawkins born without the brains are like family tae me”.’ (Colin Burnett’s Working Class State of Mind, 2021).