Neep noun turnip
‘“When you make bashed neeps,” I said, “be sure to boil the tops along with the turnips. Then save the pot liquor and give it to the children; you take some too - it’s good for your milk.”’ (Drums of Autumn)
The word neep itself has a long history in Scots. It derives ultimately from Latin nāpus, but it is also recorded in Anglo-Saxon, the common ancestor of English and Scots. Apparently, a millennium ago, næp was used in treatments for acne.
The Oxford English Dictionary notes that the word was once widespread in English dialects as well as in Scots. Thomas Blount (Glossographia, 1670) claimed that ‘the word is still retein’d in Herefordshire’. But by the eighteenth century it was a distinctively Scots usage.
The journalist Edward Topham (1751-1820) - later famous for his fashionable clothes, whiskers, and meteorite-fancying - records the word in his Letter from Edinburgh (1776): ‘A plate of small turnips, which they call “Neeps”.’ Scots hasn’t followed English in the addition of the prefix ‘tur-‘, which seems to relate to ‘turn’, referring to the vegetable’s rounded shape.
That may explain the compound neep-heid. However, ‘If I call you a neep-heid, I am not being polite. That is a pity, as the humble neep, or turnip, played an important part in our history. Today it is a figure of fun, eaten “bashed” with haggis on Burns Night and made into neep lanterns for Hallowe’en, but historians believe its cultivation made the Industrial Revolution possible.’ (Herald, 1994.)
Of course, the big question here is what vegetable a neep really is. We gloss the word as ‘turnip’, but Mrs Frazer’s The Practice of Cookery (Edinburgh, 1800) tells us it is a parsnip (the ‘pars-’ prefix is a whole different story). However, when I first came to Scotland forty years ago, the neeps in the old staff canteen were what I would have called swedes. The puzzle is solved when we investigate the vegetable’s history. It arrived first in Scotland from Sweden in the eighteenth century, and used to be referred to (in English) as a Swedish turnip. It seems they’re ALL neeps!