- maggot. W. D. Cocker warns in Further Poems (1935):
A smittle [infectious] thing the mawk, Yae [one] flee [fly] contaminates a flock.
Once the flock has become infected with maggots, it is said to be maukit. In John MacTaggart's Scottish Gallovidian Encyclopedia of 1824, one example reads:
The sheep grow mawket on the hill, And sair themsells they claw
and if you are feeling sorry for the sheep, help is at hand in another of W. D. Cocker's poems (1932):
Shorn yowes were marked wi' keel, Mawkit anes got doctored weel.
Mauk itself is probably Scandinavian in origin, and although not frequently recorded in medieval Scottish literature, there is a reference to 'mauch muttoun' (maggoty mutton) in William Dunbar's poem The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy, written sometime before 1508.
Maukit can be extended to anything or anyone that is particularly filthy and disgusting. In the Dictionaries of the Scots Language, one quotation from 1986 reads:
A friend of mine decided to wash his bike the other day cause it was mockit.
And the word may also be associated with childhood reminiscences, as in the following example from the Herald in 1993:
"My God, yur mockit, mockit, the fulthiest laddie I've ever seen" she would shriek, as she roughly rearranged the tousled ginger carpet above a face as filthy as the Earl of Hell's waistcoat".