The Scotch Diminutive

— Charles Lever, although a Protestant Irishman and a loyal British subject, seems never to have had much patience with the Scotch, and particularly resents certain un-Irish qualities displayed by such Scotchmen as have cast their lot in Ireland. There appears to be something in the thrift, the stinginess, the honest dishonesty, of a frugal Scottish emigrant that is peculiarly distasteful to a true Irishman. The latter has no indulgence for the overreaching which makes a shrewd bargain, even if all its terms are faithfully adhered to (this being a Scotch characteristic) ; while Pat, on the other hand, has the deepest and most chivalrous sympathy with the man who evades the payment of all his debts whatsoever, and stands ready to shoot the process-server.

But to return to Lever. In the pages of this novelist certain Scotch characters are made the objects of much hearty ridicule because of their propensity to diminutives, especially illustrated in the converse of daily life. To an Irishman, it seems little less than mockery for a man to address his boy as “ bairnie ” when about to administer the rod and richly deserved discipline, or to allude to his ill-fed and oft-berated hound as “ d·ggie.” And yet everywhere in Scotland we find this tendency to apply diminutives to everything that is familiar in current life. Its use even smacks of the patriarchal sentiment, and quite as much betokens ownership as petting affection. In this way Robert Burns took almost everything in Scotland under his patriarchal wing, and attached the badge of affectionate ownership to the foods and drinks, the cattle, the fields, the brooks of his native land ; if tradition speaks aright, he was himself included in this category of privileged chattelage by all who knew him, and by many who deplored him. He was ever “ Robbie ” Burns to his friends, and “ Burnie ” to his critics. Probably no other man writing the English language, or any dialect thereof, has been so much beloved : and this not alone because of his obvious faults, which make us all seem virtuous by contrast ; not alone, as George William Curtis remarks, because his penitence for those faults was most sincere and simply rendered ; but partly, we trust, because he inculcated a warmer and more loving view of his species, a more childlike faith in God, and an unfailing readiness to bestow abundantly the charity he did himself need so much.

Home-makers, home-stayers, home-defenders, preëminently, are the Scotch ; is it any wonder that their home-endearing phraseology appeals to the world ? The diminutive has for some reason been used to imply love of the gentler order, which obtains in households, rather than the more vivid passion which ornaments and gives motive to the drama, and doubtless has its origin in the maternal shibboleth. By being everywhere repeated and echoed, this fond coinage has come to be the language naturally applied to children, animals, and all things claiming our protection or indulgence. The Teutonic and Latin peoples also address every child with the du or the tu (or some equivalent therefor) ; and even our harsher English phrasing seeks to make vagrant childhood the property of all manhood and womanhood by addressing every small boy as “ bub” or “ sonny,” who in turn retorts with “ pop ” !