Kittock noun a wench, a mistress, a concubine
‘“Kittock! Mislearnit pilsh!” bellowed Mrs Chisholm, jabbing madly with her broom.’ (The Fiery Cross)
Kittock is certainly a Scottish form but it has largely disappeared, with citations restricted to the sixteenth century. It was a term used to describe - in the rather prissy terminology of the lexicographers - ‘women or girls of a low rank or character’, ‘a wench’, and ‘a mistress, concubine’. The earliest quotation in Dictionaries of the Scots Language, from around 1500, is from one of the great poet Robert Henryson’s ‘morall fabillis’, The Cock and the Fox, describing the lecherous habits of the cockerel Chanticleer: ‘He was sa lous and sa lecherous, He had … kittokis ma than seuin’.
Sir David Lyndsay, poet and herald, offers a similar situation: ‘I ken ane man, quhilk swoir greit aithis, How he did lift ane kittokis claithis’ (1540). And it is perhaps no surprise that our last occurrence of the word, in 1603, appears in a somewhat risqué (and wisely anonymous) play with the grand title Ane verie excellent and delectabill Treatise intitulit Philotus, which has the distinction of being described in the Biographia Dramatica (admittedly in 1812) as ‘by far the most offensive drama ever produced … sufficient proof of the barbarous state in which Scotland remained till civilised by its intercourse with England’. Brave words…
Kittock seems to have begun as a ‘pet’ form of the personal name Katherine, alongside more commonplace Katy and Kittie. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the ending -ock derives from: ‘a Germanic suffix represented in all the major Germanic languages … In Scots often confused or conflated with Scottish Gaelic -ag, -og, Scots -och’. Common present-day English words with the ending include bullock, buttock and hillock. It seems to have various significations, including ‘rounded protuberance’ (hillock, hummock), which might also account for bannock ‘round cake’ (from Old English bannuc, now restricted to Scots). It is also used as a diminutive, often for animals, thus haddock (fish) and ruddock/ruddoch (bird). And it is often considered disrespectful, accounting for pillock and wazzock.