On Language on Heck

[Douglas G. Wilson]

>         <<We drove all over Edinburgh, up to the castle, to the
>university, to Holyrood, to the hospitals, and through many of the
>principal streets, amid shouts, and smiles, and greetings.  Some boys
>amused me very much by their pertinacious attempts to keep up with the
>carriage.
>
>         "Heck," says one of them, "that's _her;_ see the _courls_.">>
>
>1 Stowe, Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands 81 (1854) (via Making of
>America).  It is possible, of course, that Stowe chose to use an
>American euphemism for the Scottish boys' actual exclamation.

Or maybe the boy said "Hech" /hEx/, a Scots interjection (= "Heigh").

-- Doug Wilson


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