close inshore, but took the oars out so as to prevent it being used for this purpose; how three men stood and looked at their neighbour drowning before their eyes, and then turned around and walked homewards; how another pulled past a floating woman, and paid no heed. These things have happened within forty years, and many other similar cases in every district of the country.
The other peculiarity in fishermen’s observances is their custom of proscribing certain words and names of persons or things as forbidden to be uttered while at sea. Prominently among these are the ordinary terms relating to the church, the minister, or his abode; and from this the inference may be drawn that at an early period it was believed that the mention of the new faith and its priests was hateful to the sea-god, and likely to bring his displeasure on those who named it. Later, when the English tongue was displacing the Norse of the islands, the old words were employed instead of the new when it was necessary to mention those forbidden or unlucky things, and thus, as in a dead language, these fishermen’s words and phrases were preserved and handed down to the present day. Regarded latterly by the people who used them as an unknown tongue, and by the post-Reformation clergy—all Scotchmen ignorant of the speech and traditions of the islands—as unmeaning gibberish, many of them yet survive, more or less corrupted, as evidence of an older faith and a vanished language. They are all, however, old Norse. Here may be given some of them:—baldung, a turbot; birtick, fire; bœnie, a dog; bœnibider, a dog (this is bone biter); büanhoos, banehoos, the church; clivin, the tongs; kirser, a cat; keedin, the cheek; damp, a rope’s end; finnie or funa, the fire; fistin, the chimney crook; fitting, the cat; hanlicks, mittens; matratla-stilhad, minister’s house; mudveeties, swine; ringrody or ringlody, a kettle; suntags, eyes; skünie, a knife; venga, a cat; yunsie, a hen; yera, the ear; upstanda, the minister; faigr, the sun; farr, a boat; foodin, a cat; glouriks, the eyes; heckla, the dog-fish; hemma, a wife; hoydeen, the minister; kirkasucken, the buried dead in churchyards; koy, a bed; kunie, a wife; pirraina, a girl; prestingolva, the minister; rems, remmaks, the oars; riv, the dawn; runk, an old woman; soolen, the sun: soyndick, the eye; steng, the mast; taand, a fire-brand; tevrdin, thunder; trulla-scud, a witch; ungadrengur, a young man; vamm, to bewitch; voaler, a cat; yink, a lover. From this short
