Hiddie-pyke noun a miser, a skinflint
‘“Ye neffit qurd!” she yelled, addressing her remarks to the seat of Mr Willoughby’s blue-silk trousers. “Hiddie-pyke! Slug!”’ (Voyager)
Hiddie-pyke poses us a bit of a challenge, since we have just one citation of it (from 1902) which suggests that the form is a distinctively Banffshire usage. The reference is from the still-authoritative English Dialect Dictionary (1898-1905) developed by the great pioneering dialectologist and linguistic historian, Joseph Wright. It indicates that this item was, by the end of the nineteenth century, a feature of speech rather than derived from written records: ‘He’s a real hiddie-pyke: he widd scraup hell for a bawbee gehn he wizna fleyt for burnin’s fingers.’ It is thought to be a variant of Old Scots hud-pyke, possibly from a combination of huid and pyke.
Dictionaries of the Scots Language supplies a few more references for hudpyk with this meaning and various other spellings in early written records (huidpyk, hudipyk, hudepyk, hog-pyks, hood-piks). William Dunbar (who died around 1530), the great Older Scots makar at the court of James IV, deploys hudpyk as a term of abuse, and Dunbar probably supplied the word for the slightly later Flyting between Montgomerie and Polwart (dated to around 1585). Alexander Montgomerie (d.1598) and Patrick Hume of Polwarth (d.1609) were prominent poets and courtiers, much favoured by a later monarch, James VI, as members of the king’s so-called ‘Castalian band’. ‘Flyting’, ritualised abuse, was a distinctive genre in Older Scots verse in the sixteenth century, and poets seem to have vied with each other in developing new terms with which to insult each other. It is interesting, if hudpyk started life in the specialised vocabulary of court poets, that it subsequently disappeared to re-emerge at the end of the nineteenth century in the rural north-east of Scotland.
The suggested etymology isn’t, to be honest, immediately helpful. Hud in Older Scots most commonly means ‘hood’, while pyke usually signifies ‘pike’: a pointed implement. Some considerable imagination therefore is needed to work out how the meaning ‘miser’ emerged. Perhaps hud ‘hood’ implies disguise or secretiveness, while pyke is a reference to someone who is capable of sharp practice: both characteristics of misers. There are other possibilities and, to be honest, this suggestion is a guess.