CHAPTER 2
Grouse Names
GROUSE NAMES ARE NUMEROUS, reflecting the birds’ historical importance as game, but the variety of names has lessened with the decline of languages and dialects. Below, we sample something of this richness in English, Scots, Gaelic, Irish and Welsh.
GROUSE
The English word grouse is both singular and plural. Of uncertain origin, it has been known since the early 1500s, when it was spelled grows. The Latin grus, leading to the Old French grue and meaning ‘crane’ has been suggested as its source,1 as has the French greoche, greiche, griais, meaning ‘spotted bird’. The colloquial grouse, meaning ‘to complain’, probably comes from the Old French groucier, ‘to grumble’. The verb grucer was in frequent use in Anglo-French from the second half of the twelfth century onwards, and from it developed the noun gruz, meaning ‘grumbling’.2 Hence grouse might mean ‘grumbler’, which is an apt description of the red grouse’s guttural tones.
Most species have the word grouse as part of their English name. Ptarmigan and capercaillie do not, but other names for them do, as in white grouse and wood grouse. Where English names are used in America and, increasingly, in Continental Europe where English names are used, ptarmigan covers all Lagopus species, including willow ptarmigan (often willow grouse in Europe) and rock ptarmigan (ptarmigan in Britain). This is probably because English-speaking colonists in America called any bird that turned white in winter a ptarmigan – as did Scottish zoologist MacGillivray in 1837.3
Several authors list grouse names in many languages, and note that some are onomatopoeic, resembling the birds’ calls.4 This does not seem to apply to the derivation of British or Irish names, except for ptarmigan, although we fancy that the word grouse, uttered gutturally, resembles the growling threat call of a cock red grouse (krau, krau, krau).
RED GROUSE
Most people in Britain and Ireland call this species simply grouse. Grouse-moor, grouse-butt and other terms are indicative of this usage. Table 4 gives names for red grouse in the languages of Britain and Ireland. In the Scottish National Dictionary (SND),6 muirhen is also used figuratively to mean ‘girl’, and muir-pout or grouse-pout (pronounced ‘poot’) are defined as ‘poult red grouse’ or, figuratively, ‘girl’.7 Old names for red grouse in Scots were reid foul (pronounced ‘reed fool’, and meaning ‘red fowl’), red game, and heather-cock or heather-hen.8 Another pair of names for red grouse in Scots and in the dialect of north England was gorcock and gorhen, now obsolescent though still appearing in Scots poetry. The meaning is uncertain, but gor might mean ‘gore’, depicting the bird’s reddish plumage.
PTARMIGAN
The English word ptarmigan came from the Scots tarmagan. Other English names for the species are white grouse,9 rock grouse, snow grouse, arctic grouse, barren-ground bird and, in Newfoundland, rocker. The name rock ptarmigan, which originated in North America and is now widely used, makes good sense because the bird is usually found amongst rocks, where it is suitably camouflaged. To French Canadians, it is lagopède des rochers, meaning ‘ptarmigan of the rocks’.
The Scots form, tarmagan, came from the Gaelic masculine noun tàrmachan, with stress on tar.10 The evidence indicates that both this word and its Irish equivalent came from an Irish and, later, Gaelic word, meaning ‘noisy one’ or ‘rumbling one’, doubtless referring to the bird’s calls. The spelling ptarmigan was established in English when Thomas Pennant borrowed it from a Scottish book published in 1684, where ptarmigan was written inaptly as if from the Greek pteron, as in pterodactyl, meaning ‘wing’ or ‘feather’ (SND). The inappropriate ‘p’ became universal from the early 1800s.
BLACK GROUSE
If the word grouse means ‘grumbler’, as suggested above, it seems appropriate for the red grouse, with its guttural calls, but not for the black grouse. Presumably this original meaning for grouse was lost before the modern usage of the name black grouse was established. Since red grouse were, and are, commoner and more widespread than black grouse, people would have used the general name grouse for red grouse, as they still do today (see above). An old name for the black grouse in English, as given in the 1971 Oxford English Dictionary (OED), was heath-bird, with heath-cock and heath-hen used for the sexes. These terms were used in Scotland, too, along with the collective heathfowl.11 Today, we also have names that describe the plumage – blackcock and greyhen – as well as the collective term blackgame.
CAPERCAILLIE
This name is from the Scots capercailzie. It came from the Gaelic capall (often capull in older dictionaries), literally ‘mare’ or, in some parts of the Highlands, ‘horse’ or ‘colt’, and coille, meaning ‘wood’ – making capall-coille, or ‘horse of (the) wood’. ‘Horse’ is often used as a prefix to indicate ‘large’ or ‘coarse’, as in horse-chestnut, horse mushroom and horseradish. Thus, Dwelly (1971) in Gaelic lists capull-coille, or ‘great cock of the wood’, with capar-coille as a variant. Another Gaelic dictionary has capall-coille, meaning ‘capercailzie’ or ‘wood grouse’,12 and an Irish one cites capall coille.13 A similar noun is capull-abhainn, meaning ‘river-horse’ and referring to hippopotamus. These instances and the OED all point to the use of the word ‘horse’ in the sense of ‘great’ or ‘big’ rather than as the animal. Similarly, one meaning of the Irish capall is ‘large or coarse species’, as in cnó capaill (horse-chestnut) and péist chapaill (large caterpillar).
The SND quotes a 1760 reference to capercaillie as Caper Keily (Cock of the Wood), one in 1775 as Caperkylie (also ‘Cock of the wood’), and one in 1835 as the ‘king of game’ or the ‘great cock-of-the-wood’, capperkailzie. Ian Pennie cited authors in 1676-8 who wrote of capercaillie in Ireland, including the Irish-speaking province of Connacht, where in English they called it cock-of-the-wood or cock-of-the-mountain.14
Alteration to the spelling capar-coille eased pronunciation.15 Euphonic change is frequent in Gaelic, in Scots pronunciations of Gaelic names (e.g. Banff is pronounced ‘bamf’) and in English (e.g. in brought, where the ‘gh’ was formerly pronounced ‘ch’ as in ‘Bach’). In his classic essay on the Gaelic of east Perthshire, Charles Robertson wrote: ‘Lunnain, muinichill, and capall-coille are with us Lumainn, muilichir, and capar-coille.’16 This shows how capall-coille became capar-coille.
The ‘z’ in capercailzie came from the Middle English and old Scots letter yogh, written ‘3’ and, pronounced like the ‘y’ in the English word ‘yonder’ (SND; OED). Printers used a ‘z’ instead because they did not have a ‘3’. Likewise, ‘lz’ in English derives from the Middle English ‘ly’ according to Brown, and the Gaelic coille is pronounced ‘kilye’, with stress on kil and an indeterminate final ‘e’ as in the German ‘bitte’, hence the Scots ‘y’ sound. Some people sound the ‘z’, aping the spelling incorrectly by pronouncing it as a zed, just as some pronounce Menzies with a zed. Others pronounce it as ‘capercailyee’, ‘caperceilyee’ (‘ei’ as in ‘height’) and ‘capercailzee’ (with ‘z’ as in ‘zebra’), and as ‘caiper’ with the same three endings, as well as ‘caipercaillie’.17
To conclude, the name capercaillie originated from capall-coille, meaning ‘big wood-bird’, ‘big wood-cock’ or more poetically, ‘great cock of the wood’.
# Variants include ptarmachan, tarmachan, tarmachin, tarmack, tarmagant, tarmagen, tarmigan, termagan, termegant, termigan, termigant and tormican.
* Variants include Capperkailzie, Caper Coille, Caper Keily and Caperkellie, ‘the male being sometimes also called the Great Cock of the Woods, or Mountain Cock…Also simply caper…Probably a corruption of capal-coille, the great cock of the wood, from capull, a horse (for horse as used to indicate largeness, cf. horse-radish)’ (SND).
** Variants include tàrmachan breac na beinne (spotted ptarmigan of the hill), eun bàn an t-sneachda (white bird of the snow), gealagbheinne (hill white-one), and sneachdag, sneachdair and sneachdan (snow-one). Gordon (1915) has tarmachan creagach (rocky ptarmigan).
^ Nicolaisen (1963), but Ó Dónaill (1977) gives this and coileach-coille as ‘woodcock’.
OTHER TERMS
Two terms from Scots and northern English now appear in international literature on grouse, though not in some English dictionaries. One is the verb and noun beck, meaning ‘a bird’s call’ (especially that of a red grouse), along with the adjective and participle becking. The second is clocker, meaning ‘dropping’ and referring to the large lump of hoarded faeces voided by incubating hen grouse or poultry. To clock formerly meant ‘to cluck like a broody hen’ and hence ‘to brood’, the latter being the usual meaning nowadays. In Scots, on the clock is ‘the state of being broody’, the adjective being clocking, while a clocker is ‘a broody hen’.
In English, lek is both ‘a display-ground’ and ‘the behaviour that takes place at a display-ground’. In Norwegian and Swedish, the noun lek means ‘play’, from the Old Norse leika, ‘to play’. The Old English lacan was ‘to frolic’ or ‘to fight’, and the Old Scots laik meant ‘sport’ or ‘play’ (OED; SND). North English dialect has lake and play-laking for ‘sport’ or ‘play’, and the Scots laik is ‘plaything’ or ‘marble’. The north English and Scots pronunciations were like the English ‘lake’, though with a shorter vowel, not as in the current English lek, where the ‘e’ is pronounced as in ‘hen’. Ingemar Hjorth wrote that the Swedish word lek referred to the behaviour, not the place, so he used arena for the place instead.18
SUMMARY
The English word grouse possibly originated in the French griais, meaning ‘spotted bird’, or, more likely, in the Anglo-French groucier, meaning ‘to grumble’ – hence ‘grumbling bird’. The English ptarmigan came from the Scots tarmagan, which in turn came from the Gaelic tarmachan. The Gaelic form probably originated in torm, meaning ‘noise’ – hence ‘noisy one’. The unvoiced ‘p’ resulted from fancy that the word was Greek, as in pterodactyl. The English capercaillie came from the Scots capercailzie, which in turn came from the Gaelic capall-coille, literally ‘wood-horse’. Here, ‘horse’ was used in the sense of ‘big’, as in horse-chestnut, and the name was translated into English as ‘the great cock of the wood’. Gaels in east Perthshire pronounced the word capar-coille – hence the ‘r’ in the Scots and English capercaillie.