Gowk noun a cuckoo; a fool; a joke
‘“Am I a Sassenach?” Brianna seemed delighted at the name. “Of course ye are, gowk. But I like ye fine, anyway.”’ (Voyager)
Gowk literally means cuckoo, but it can also mean fool. The word derives from Old Norse gaukr and has been recorded in Scots with the sense of cuckoo since the fifteenth century. It makes an early appearance, in the company of other birds, in William Dunbar’s account (c.1508) of an unfortunate fraud who attempted to fly with borrowed feathers: ‘The golk, the gormaw [cormorant], and the gled [hawk], Beft [beat] him with buffettis quhill [until] he bled.’
The timing of the gowk’s arrival, coinciding with changeable weather, has given rise to the expression ‘a gowk’s storm’, meaning one of short duration. It is used figuratively in a letter from the Earl of Huntly (1594), in which, Patrick F Tytler’s History of Scotland tells us: ‘he spoke of the King's rumoured campaign as likely to turn out a gowk’s storm’.
Derogatory uses of gowk appear soon afterwards. The sixteenth century diarist, Alexander Brodie, described an occasion where he had cause to lose his temper: ‘My woful passion brok out, and I cald him a fool and gouk.’ And in James Miller’s 1992 novel A Fine White Stoor he writes: ‘most of the crofters thought Magnus an arrogant gowk, over fond of the sound of his own voice and of giving an opinion when not asked’.
An April Fool, may be said to ‘hunt the gowk’, and in Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering a character complains of being ‘sent out on a hunt-the-gowk errand’. Gowk also refers to a joke or prank, as in George A. H. Douglas’ tale of the Further Adventures of Rab Hewison (1920): ‘Gouks we played on yin an’ a’.
Finally, J K Annand’s poem, The Gowk, illustrates this sense with gentle humour: ‘I met a gowk frae Penicuik Wha thocht he was a bird; The wey he flaffed and cried “Cuckoo”, He lookit fair absurd. Whit wey he thinks he is a bird, I haena got a clue; But tho he’s no a feathered gowk, There’s nae dout he’s cuckoo.’