Prink verb to make smart, to strut; to make smart
‘“Roger Mac showed me the wee picture ye drew for Jem, all tiny things like dragonflies prinking in the flowers…”’ (A Breath of Snow and Ashes)
Prink is another wonderfully versatile word. Its central sense is to make smart or pretty. A good example comes from Swatches o’ Hamespun in 1923: ‘Fan Rob got there, here’s ma lady a’ prinkit oot in ’er braw’ry [finery].
It can also mean to strut or swagger. Anne Donovan’s Matilda in Scots (2019) gives a nice example of this: ‘There wis nae way he could ever come intae a chaumer [room] doucely [quietly]. He aye hud tae prink in and make a stushie so everybody wid notice him.’ And in The New Makars (1991) Tom Hubbard uses it the sense of swanking: ‘See aa yon academic chiels [men] wha prink And preen in snobbish clubs…’
Related to these senses is the one from A Breath of Snow and Ashes - to shine or glitter. There is a lovely early example of this use from Allan Ramsay’s Vision in his collection of Scots poems, Ever Green (1761): ‘Thair in a wyde and splendit hall, Reird up [built with] with shynand [shining] beims, Quhais [whose] rufe-treis [roof beams] were of rainbows all, And paist with starrie gleims, Quhilk [which] prinked and twinkled Brichtly beyond compair.’ Similarly, a twentieth-century example comes from John Paterson’s poem Da Corbie [the raven] (1923): ‘Supraeme sits he, His fedders prinkin, Sun-bricht, Ita [into] da grit [great] sun’s glinkin [gleaming]…’
Finally, Alexander Montgomerie in Flyting with Polwart uses it as a noun, to mean someone silly and vain: ‘pert prattling prink’ (c.1582). A flyte is a contest or altercation, seen in literary references to mean poets having a rhyming stand-off.