Dominie noun a schoolmaster, teacher
‘He had no idea of the staffing requirements of Purgatory; it wasn’t a matter the dominie had addressed in his schooldays.’ (Voyager)
Every World Book Night many will remember a great teacher or schoolmaster. Dominie is derived from the Latin dominus (lord or master). However, our earliest record refers to the now obsolete meaning of a ‘student at a University’ and comes from J Kelly’s Proverbs (1721): ‘Doves and Domines leave ay a foul House’.
Both in Scotland and England, dominie was also formerly used as a term for a clergyman. This sense can still be found in American English, as in the following from the New York Review of Books (2004): ‘William Elliott Griffis … was one of the giddiest revisionist historians, so much a victim of Holland fever that he even served for many years as the dominie of a Dutch Reformed Church in Schenectady’.
Dominie, meaning teacher, is found in texts from England dating back to the seventeenth century too, though it is now largely restricted to Scotland. Our earliest Scottish evidence for the word dates back to the eighteenth century. One of Robert Smith’s Poems of Controversy (1714), for instance, makes reference to a grant of money to keep a teacher: ‘the hunder Merk, Which the Queen granted to Glenshee, For to maintain a Dominie’. And it sometimes becomes part of that person’s name, as in Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering (1815): ‘Abel Sampson, commonly called, from his occupation as a pedagogue, Dominie Sampson’.
Dominie is still found in modern Scots, though it is often used in reference to educators from a bygone era. In Kate Atkinson’s novel, Emotionally Weird (2000), for example: ‘Watson Grant's door … was open to reveal a group of bored students to whom he was dictating like an old-fashioned dominie’. Also in 2000, an article in the Sunday Herald described Tam Dalyell’s powerful voice as ‘a sound reaching back … to an Etonian schooling in the late 1940s, and to classroom discipline as a Bo’ness Academy dominie in the late 1950s’.
Unfortunately, this particular dominie was noted for his fondness for a wee refreshment: ‘There’s Dominie Davie, sae glib i’ the mou, But it’s like ye will fin’ the auld carl blin’ fou’. (Sketches from Nature A Maclagan 1851).