Quarestuff
Borrowed Words

Lug

Pronunciation /lʌɡ/
Part of speech noun
Region Ulster
First recorded Old Norse
Filed under Borrowed Words

An ear. Plain everyday Ulster Scots usage. Heard in fixed phrases - 'a clip round the lug', 'keep an ear to the lug-hole' - and as a working noun. Standard 'ear' coexists; lug carries more bodily directness.

Etymology

From Old Norse 'lugg', via Scots 'lugge'. Cognates run across the Scandinavian languages: Norwegian and Swedish 'lugg' carry related senses. Norse settlement in northern Britain and Ireland during the Viking Age left a particular trail of body-part words in the local vocabulary - and where Norse contact was densest, those words survived. Ulster Scots and Scots both inherited the word; English lost it almost everywhere else.

In a sentence

"He'll get a clip round the lug if he keeps that up."

Historical notes

Lug is one of the cleanest examples of the Norse-Scots inheritance in Ulster speech. The Vikings left names for parts of the body, the landscape, and the boat; centuries later, Scots-speaking settlers carried that vocabulary into Ulster, and lug stayed. The construction 'a clip round the lug' is the most-used form in modern Ulster - the threat (and the historical practice) of an adult clipping a child round the ear for misbehaviour.

Sources

  1. Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL), entry LUG n. · dictionary