- this is defined with some affection in the Scottish National Dictionary as:
The Scottish sheep-dog, remarkable for its sagacity.
According to Sir Walter Scott, in Waverley (1817):
A French tourist... has recorded, as one of the memorabilia of Caledonia, that the state maintained in each village a relay of curs, called collies, whose duty it was to chase the chevaux de poste (too starved and exhausted to move without such a stimulus) from one hamlet to another.
I personally know of a descendant of such collies, which spent its prematurely curtailed life rounding up motor vehicles and trying to persuade them to proceed along the main street in the direction of its choice.
If someone says to you Collie, wull ye lick or Collie wull ye taste, interpret this as an invitation to partake of food. Unfortunately, this phrase more often appears in the negative:
I've sat whole nichts in their hooses an they never so much as said to me, "Collie, wull ye lick?"
(O. DOUGLAS Ann and her Mother 1922)
This inhospitable behaviour did not daunt a certain bishop, as David Calderwood records in The History of the Kirk of Scotland (1651):
The Bishop was nicknamed Collie, because he was so impudent and shameless, that when the Lords of the Session and Advocates went to dinner, he was not ashamed to follow them into their houses, unasked, and sat down at their table.