The Scots word baise, sometimes spelled baiss, is on the verge of becoming obsolete. A pity this: it is a good word for ashamed; sad, sorrowful. It was once used in Rathlin Island off the Antrim coast, and was included in a list of Rathlin words given to me long ago by Tom McCuaig, a journalist from the island. James Hogg from Selkirk, known as The Etterick Shepherd, and a friend of Sir Walter Scott's, has the word in Winter Evening Tales, first published in 1820: "But quhan yer Maigestye jinkyt fra me in the baux… I was baiss to kum again wi'sikkan ane ancere [answer]."

Baise is the same word as baiss, an old form of bash, an aphetic form of abash, to be ashamed or abashed; compare abaissed in Piers Plowman: "Nought abaissed to agulte God and all good men." From the Old French esbahiss-, prp. stem of esbahir (modern ébahir), to astonish profoundly.

A Co Antrim reader sent me the word bis, which means, or meant, a stall for a horse or cow; also the upper part of the stall, where fodder is placed. The Ballymena Observer recorded this word in 1892. A cognate word is boose, found in many dialects in England from Northumberland, Yorkshire and Lancashire to Cheshire, Derbyshire and Leicestershire. The EDD has the following from Derbyshire: "When a man weds a second wife, older than, and perhaps not as handsome as the first, they say, "he has put Brownie into Cherry's boose." The great dictionary also lists some compounds: Boose-cheese is cheese made before the cows are turned out to grass in the spring; boose-seal, a piece of wood or a chain by which cows are fastened in a stall; and boose-stake, a stake in a cow-house.

Figuratively, the word can mean a seat at table; a bed; a situation, place, position. The venerable scholarly journal, Notes and Queries, in its 1884 edition, has, of the rejection of a Lancashire MP, "They'll ha' to find him another boose."

There is a phrase, to get into Cherry's boose, to get into a warm berth, or comfortable situation. This was recorded in Cheshire. We are not told anything about Cherry, but it seems that she was generous kind of a girl, known in Derbyshire as well (see above).

Phillips in his 1706 dictionary has, "Boose, a word us'd in some places for an ox-stall or cow-stall." Capt Grose, in 1790, has the word from Antrim: "A snug boose." Levins, in his 1570 Manipulus Vocabulorum, has "boose, stall, bouile."

The Old English is bós, whence bósig; the Old Norse is báss, the German banse.