Kittle verb to tickle, stir or poke up
‘“I never thought to find ye in a kittle-hoosie, Jamie!”’ (Voyager)
This word should kittle your fancy. It comes from Old Norse kitla, meaning to tickle. Hochmagandy is suggested in our earliest citation, from Sir David Lindsay’s The Complaynte of Scotland (1549): ‘Cum kyttil me naykyt vantounly’. And, indeed, in Outlander a kittle hoosie is a brothel.
In W D Latto’s Tammas Bodkin (1864), a forward woman ‘kissed the man ... an’ kittled his oxters’. However, other less wanton quotations refer to innocent kittling of children’s oxters (armpits) and feet.
John Galt writes in his Annals of the Parish (1821) how an unfortunate churchgoer suffered: ‘A terrible host (cough) that came on her in the kirk, by taking a kittling in her throat’. If only she had read of ‘The famous Lozenges’ in the Caledonian Mercury of 1739: ‘The Virtues thereof are, they perfectly cure the Cough, kittling of the Throat’.
Another remedy is recorded by John R Allan in his North-East Lowlands of Scotland (1952). He is using kittle in the sense of stimulate or revive, delicately explaining that: ‘married men hae sometimes a difficulty o putting their wives wi a bairn … Sometimes it’s the man that’s no on his mettle and a diet o good green kale can kittle him.’ Kale as aphrodisiac. Who knew?
There are many other senses of this word. You can kittle up a fire or kittle up trouble. But if circumstances kittle up, that means a change for the better. Perhaps unsurprisingly, kittle can also mean to perplex or puzzle: ‘The Case was new, and very kittle, Which puzzl’d a’ the Court na little (Allan Ramsay, Poems, 1728). If a person kittles, they give way to temper. There’s an example in William Shelley’s Wayside Flowers (1868): ‘She kittled like a caird [tinker] in drink’.
Then there is kittling of musical strings. Dougal Graham (Collected Writings, 1883) writes: ‘A better violer never scrided [scraped] on a silken cord, or kittled a cat's tryps [intestines] with his finger-ends.’
Finally, kittle also means skilful, as in: ‘The bailie was a kittle hand at a bowl of toddy.’ (John Galt, The Provost, 1822). Slainte.