Hurdies noun buttocks, hips, haunches
‘“… all yon rubbish that we be squattin’ on and pickin’ oot from under our hurdies day and night…”’ (Drums of Autumn)
Hurdies is another of those mysterious words for which there isn’t really an adequate etymology. One possibility, bordering on a guess, is that it is a diminutive of hurd, meaning heap or pile or, sometimes, boulder (used figuratively). However, hurd with this meaning seems now to be restricted to Shetland (the word is related to the Norwegian dialectal urd, meaning heap of stones).
Wherever the word is originally from, it is certainly a common and distinctively Scots word now, attested since at least the sixteenth century. Sir David Lindsay uses it in his play Ane Satire of the Thrie Estaitis (1552), demonstrating that buttocks could play a role in works of political and moral significance: ‘Of hir hurdies scho [she] had nah hauld.’
The session records of Elgin for 1622 record a rather grim complaint about the delay in burning two unfortunate witches: ‘There was lytell justice in Elgen that sufferitt them leiwe [allowed them to leave] so lang onhett [unheated or, in this case, unburnt] baithe ther hurdeis’.
It subsequently becomes regularly deployed, both in the singular and plural, by the great eighteenth-century poets Allan Ramsay, Robert Fergusson and - of course - Robert Burns in Tam o’ Shanter (1790): ‘Thir breeks o’ mine, my only pair, … I wad hae gi’en them aff my hurdies For ae blink o’ the bonie burdies!’ And, demonstrating the many Scots words for the rear-end, there is this from Sheena Blackhall in 1995: ‘His dowp, behouchie, his dock or hurdies, Are twa roon meens [moons] ower grim fur wirdies…’ (Lament for the Raj).
There are also many compounds containing the word found in oral sources. For instance, ower the hurdies (up to the eyes in debt) is a usage recorded in Perthshire in 1957. The injury known as hurdiekeckle is ‘a pain in the back and thighs caused by prolonged stooping as in the harvest-field’ (heard in the Mearns in 1877 and Aberdeenshire in 1931). A hurdie gig, in 1930, was a pony trap in Morayshire. Hurdy-bane, for hip-bone, seems to be fairly common, even now. And finally, hurdie-rickle for rheumatism seems to have been in widespread use at the beginning of the twentieth century.