Ked noun the sheep tick
‘“Oh, aye? And you’re the little ked’s pimpmaster, are ye?”’ (Voyager)
Looking after sheep is a demanding task in any situation, and the tough conditions confronting many Scottish shepherds mean that Scots has a rich body of relevant specialised vocabulary. The lexicon of the Scottish sheep ranges from boucht ‘sheepfold’; eenach ‘the natural grease in sheep’s wool’ (an Aberdeenshire term); through nibbie ‘shepherd’s crook’ and rodding - the ‘narrow track trodden out by sheep’; to smot ‘mark sheep with colouring as a sign of ownership’. Ked, the sheep louse or tick (melophagus ovinus), is one of this body of terms.
As ever, though, it could always be used as a term of abuse … Alexander Montgomerie’s Flyting between Montgomerie and Polwart (around 1605) has: ‘Some choppis the keddis into theyr cheekes’. And the poet and Covenanter soldier William Cleland (d.1689) deployed the word in similarly satirical fashion: ‘Their swarms of vermine and sheep kaids, Delights to lodge beneath the plaids’.
Ked (there are many alternative spellings) first appears in the Manipulus Vocabulorum (1570) of Peter Levins. Levins was a Yorkshireman, and other early citations for the word are also to be found in works by northern English writers. Most records, though, are from Scottish sources.
More recent citations focus on treating this condition, with varying degrees of success. John Smith, in his General View of the Agriculture of the County of Argyll (1798), tells us that ‘Fags, or kades [as he calls them], are destroyed by a mixture of soap and mercury’, while William Singer, in a companion volume (General View of the Agriculture in the County of Dumfries, 1812), recommends that they are to be ‘pour[ed] … with an infusion of tobacco’. However, others were clearly sceptical of such approaches. Alexander Campbell, in his A Journey from Edinburgh (1802), records how ‘Kades … and other local diseases incident to sheep, are treated variously, but with very little success’.
The word’s origins are obscure, but ked was still current in oral sources as late as 1959 in areas ranging from Shetland in the north through Perthshire and Fife to Dumfries and Galloway.