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COLLIE BUCKIE n a piggy-back ride

There are many descriptions of piggy-back or pick-a-back rides in the Dictionary of the Scots Language (www.dsl.ac.uk) but the most common of these is collie-buckie or coalie backie which indicates that the term comes from the similarity of a ‘coal porter’ carrying a bag of coal on his back.

 

The sparsity of written records is because in essence this come from children’s language and children’s games which by their very nature were rarely written down except for specialist collectors such as the writer James T R Ritchie in his Golden City published in 1965 which documents Edinburgh children’s street games, and I & P Opie who documented children’s games throughout the United Kingdom in their work Children’s Games, published in 1969 and recorded collie back from Aberdeen and Edinburgh. 

 

In the Dictionary of the Scots Language many variations of collie buckie are documented so we have: coalie back from an informant in Argylleshire and from Selkirk in 1975 we have collie-cod and Edinburgh informants in the 1990s gave us both collie buckie and coalie backie. One scarce written example comes from John Byrne’s The Slab Boys (1987): “Hector had to give him a coalie-back down the stairs.” A twenty-first century written example comes from the Edinburgh Evening News of 20th August 2002: “…as he gave them “coalie buckie” rides on his back.”

 

Children also turned collie buckies into a rough boys’ game called a ‘collie buckie fight’ which involved “a jostling or jousting by children mounted on the back of others, a pick-a-back fight”. 

 

Scots Word of the Week is written by Pauline Cairns Speitel of Scottish Language Dictionaries  www.scotsdictionaries.org.uk 25 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9LN (0131) 650 4146  mail@scotsdictionaries.org.uk