Nyaff/Neffit noun small; adjective annoying, talkative
‘“Ye neffit qurd!” she yelled, addressing her remarks to the seat of Mr Willoughby’s blue-silk trousers. “Hiddie-pyke! Slug!”’ (Voyager)
Neffit derives from nyaff and nyaff quite commonly appears in print. It is often used of someone who causes a nuisance. When reporting on the increased police presence at a well-known Glasgow street market (November 2005), the Scottish edition of The Mirror added: ‘Rumour has it that a visiting inspector got his car tyres slashed by a wee nyaff when out checking the stalls and that is the real reason for the crackdown.’
Nyaff is first recorded in John Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary of the Scots Language (1808). For him, it meant ‘to yelp, to bark’ and referred to the noise made by a small dog, a child, or ‘any person of a diminutive appearance’. This account also points to an onomatopoeic origin for the word, with nyaff being coined in imitation of the sound made by a small dog. A similarly imitative Scots word is nurr or nyirr, now largely restricted to the far north of Scotland, which originally denoted a growl or snarl but later developed the meaning ‘to nag or find fault with’.
A number of derivatives of nyaff have also had some currency during the time since the nineteenth century. If you nyaffled along you would be walking with short steps, and if you were caught nyaffling you might be accused of wasting time or working ineffectually. In the early twentieth century, being called a nyafferel would have meant you were deemed mischievous or insignificant.
Nyaff remains a popular descriptive term. James Robertson used the word to describe a shoplifter in his 2000 novel, The Fanatic: ‘He stood up, and Carlin saw for the first time what a puny, insignificant, shilpit wee nyaff he really was’. Some accounts of the word also helpfully explain the contrast between nyaffs and other unpleasant specimens. Readers of Stanley Baxter’s Bedside Book of Glasgow Humour (1986) will have discovered that: ‘whereas the bachle is self-effacing, the nyaff is self-assured, even aggressive’.