Feart adjective to be afraid, frightened, fear for
‘“Ye’ll not find that one a husband for less than ten pound … A man would be feart of bein’ bitten when he kissed her.”’ (An Echo in the Bone)
Feart is technically the past participle of the verb fear ‘to be afraid’. However, in Scots, we can be feart of something or just plain feart. Here’s a (slightly censored) recent citation from James Kelman’s Greyhound for Breakfast (1988): ‘Don’t give us that, replied Ronnie. What about those big ***** alsatians! You’re feart to walk in here sometimes in case you step on a tail and get ***** swallowed.’
William McIlvanney in The Big Man (1987) tells us that ‘… The place is lowpin wi’ mad dugs. It’s a sign of the times. They’re all that feart from one another these days …’ And here is a less ‘literary’ example, this time from an oral source (Edinburgh 1992): ‘Ma Ma’s awfy feart fae dugs’. Feart and dugs seem to go together.
The usage has been around a good while and was once more widespread across the Scots-English linguistic continuum; indeed, one of the earliest citations is from Geoffrey Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale (London, around 1386): ‘The veray hogges So fered were for berking of the dogges’. But in later centuries the usage seems to have died out south of the border and become distinctive of Scots. There are numerous citations, with final -d rather more common than final -t until comparatively recently. James Kelly, in his Scottish Proverbs (1721), offers the following lapidary statement: ‘You are fear’d of the Day you never saw’ (something to ponder on), while Robert Louis Stevenson, in Kidnapped (1886), described one character as ‘…unco [extremely] feared of fires’. And in Orkney in 1952 we are told that ‘The men in Stenwick is aafil faird for makkin’ gappuses [fools] o’ thirsels’.
One interesting Scots feature is the habit of turning feart into a verb in its own right. A good example is the past participle feartit, recorded in Ellie McDonald’s Dundonian translation from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream (1991): ‘… say … that I Pyramus am nae Pyramus but Bottom the Wabster. Syne they’ll no be feartit’. Dictionaries of the Scots Language is a bit sniffy about this usage: ‘A corrupt form based on feart, s.v. Fear, v.’ That’s telling them!