Ratton (Ratten) noun a rat
‘“De’il tak’ ye, ye wee ratten,” she was saying crossly to the little boy as they clattered out of the shop together.’ (Voyager)
The origin of this word is from Old French raton, meaning a little rat - exemplified by this cheeky wee fellow from Robert Wodrow’s Analecta (1702): ‘In the midle [sic] of the sermon, a ratton came and sat doon on his Bible.’
The rats didn’t get it all their own way though. David Lindsay recorded these depths of deprivation in Experience & Courteour (1554): ‘Necessitie gart thame eit [made them eat] perforsse Dog, Catt and Rattone.’ You’d have to be especially desperate to consider consuming a rat given that most folk have the same reaction to them as the one recorded in Iain McGregor’s The Ratton (2011): ‘A laith [loathe] rattons! Thay war scunnersome baists an gied iz the heebie jeebies ivry time A seen thaim.’
However, not everyone wishes rats away. ‘Ratton-flitting, a flitting of rats. Sometimes these animals, for causes known to themselves, leave one haunt where they have fed well a long time, and go to another … People do not like the rats to disappear thus on a sudden, as the thing is thought to portend nothing good.’ (John MacTaggart, The Scottish Gallovidian Encyclopedia 1824).
Perhaps oddly, ratton is also a term of endearment in Scots, used generally of children. James Horne used it in this way in Poems (1865): ‘When ye declare ye canna gang To school, my rotton.’ It can also be used playfully of adults. ‘A gae wily rotton was our Aunty Meg’ (William Anderson, Rhymes, Reveries and Reminiscences, 1851).
And less playfully, more derogatively here (from James Lorimer’s The Red Sergeant 1931): ‘Dod, it’s a gran’ baar [joke] tae get a rise oot o’ the sodgers [soldiers], an’ a better ane tae hae a batter at that than naisty rottans frae the To’booth.’
Dictionaries of the Scots Language additionally records a number of ratty compounds, including a ratton’s rest (a state of perpetual unrest). This is nicely illustrated in ‘rottin’s rist an’ futtrit’s fykin’ (literally ‘rat’s rest and weasel’s fidgeting’), reported in 1929 as an off-hand way of bidding goodnight in Aberdeen.
Finally, perhaps inevitably given the number of words for fighting in Scots, to ratten someone is to assault them.