Gauds noun tricks, showy finery
‘“Then I went back yesterday, meaning to buy you a bit of jewelry … and whilst the goodwife was showing me the gauds, we happened to speak of this and that…”’ (Drums of Autumn)
As well as trinkets and baubles, a gaud in Scots can mean a few things. It can, for instance (from a form deriving from Old Norse gaddr ‘spike’) mean an iron bar used in prisons, a spear, a goad for driving horses or cattle, and even a fishing-rod. But, with a distinct etymology (related to the Anglo-Norman verb gaudir ‘rejoice, make merry, scoff at’), gauds also means tricks or pranks.
An early citation of this sense is from Andro Wyntoun’s Orygynale Cronikil (around 1420), with a suitably scathing comment on an English monarch’s behaviour: ‘This king Edward all with gawdys Knakkyd [mocked] Robert the Brws with frawdis’.
The word is found in English texts too. Chaucer uses it in his Parson’s Tale (around 1386), and Samuel Harsnett (Archbishop of York, d.1631) referred rather provocatively to how: ‘There was never Christmas Game performed with moe apish indecent slovenly Gawdes then your Baptising and Super-baptising Ceremonies are’ (A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, 1603).
In Scots, the term was also used to refer to animal behaviour. William Leslie’s General View of the Agriculture in the Counties of Nairn and Moray (1813), for instance, refers to a gaud as ‘an ill habit, applied to horses and cattle’. There is also a derived adjective: gaudy ‘of a horse: tricky, full of mischief’.
English usage become specialised to refer to ‘pomps and vanities’ or to a plaything or toy - as in this citation from A Visit to Italy (1842) by the travel-writer Fanny Trollope: ‘The gaud that most delights the ladies … is old lace’. And in Scots, this meaning was extended in the ballad tradition. We have a citation from The Bogle-Bo, a poem collected by the antiquary Robert Jamieson in Popular Ballads and Songs (1806). It describes how a town tailor, Tam Tod, was ‘weel versed i’ the gawds o’ the sex’. Gauds in this instance seems to be something women are prone to exhibit (not, perhaps, entirely tactful since Jamieson had dedicated the collection to the Duchess of Gordon …).