Jo noun a sweetheart
‘“No, my jo,” he said softly. “Ye need me here, and here I shall stay.”’ (Dragonfly in Amber)
This word is a Scots variant of joy and - as ‘my jo’ - can mean either a sweetheart or lover, or be a term of endearment akin to dear or darling. Probably the best-known example of it is in the Robbie Burns song John Anderson My Jo (1789): ‘John Anderson my jo, John; We clamb the hill thegither; And monie a cantie day, John; We've had wi' ane anither; Now we maun totter down, John; And hand in hand we'll go; And sleep thegither at the foot; John Anderson, my jo!’
There are many other examples of it in Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL), dating from the sixteenth century onwards. A jo can be anyone dear to the speaker - as illustrated by this from David Lyndsay’s Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis (1540): ‘Quhat wald thow, my deir dochter Jenny. Jenney my joe, quhat dois thy daddy?’
Jo also appears in phrases such as playing ‘jook my jo’ meaning to flirt, as in this example from S R Crockett’s The Raiders (1894): ‘That’s what auld Airlie gies to young birkies [conceited young men] like you that come in graund coats to play “Jook my jo” wi’ his lasses.’
Then there’s penny-jo, meaning a prostitute. R L Stevenson in Underwoods (1887) refers unglamorously to ‘Penny joes on causey stanes’ in a list of unfortunates, sandwiched between ‘hoastin weans [coughing children]’ and ‘auld folk wi’ the crazy banes’.
Jo can appear in a variety of combinations, for example this from P H Hunter’s James Inwick (1894): ‘it hadna been a’ hinny [honey] an’ jo wi’ us’ - indicating the variable course of true love.
But most of the examples in DSL illustrate the joy that the word expresses. From the animal world, we have the wholehearted ‘sang o the lintie a-courting his joe’ in The Poets and Poetry of Linlithgowshire, edited by A M Bisset (1896). And the euphoria of love is summed up in Violet Jacob’s Bonnie Joann (1921): ‘But my feet danced oot to meet my joe’.