Words We Use: Gawk

Where I come from the word gawk means to stare, to gape. This meaning is common in English dialects, and the verb also means to wander aimlessly about. Barnes, that fine 19th-century Dorset dialect poet, wrote, "Mother said she'd sooner hear me stammer/Than gauk about a-gabblen rhymes an' Latin." Hence gawkamouth, gawker and gawkhammer, a gaping fool, one who stares vacantly, and gawkin or gakin, a simpleton.

"He's a poor gawkhammer. Look at his sermon yesterday," wrote Thomas Hardy from Dorset in Under the Greenwood Tree, in 1872. Yorkshireman Cudworth, in his interesting Dialect Sketches (1884), had, "Dicky, he saw, wor sum soft country gawkin." From west Yorkshire the English Dialect Dictionary has, "A fond [foolish] gawkin fellah – pretha who is he?"

Gawkum is a dialect word for a simpleton, a booby, a stupid clumsy fellow, used in Sussex, Hampshire, Devon, Cornwall and Somerset. It has not reached Ireland as far as I know. The EDD has "Well-a-day, thay iver I should 'ave been born tu be tha mawther ov sich a gawkum as thee art."

"There comed en a grinning gawkum," was reported from Cornwall, as was "Sich a gawkum wre I!" As a verb gawkum means to joke, to make a fool of somebody. Sweetman has the word in his Somerset Wincanton Glossary in 1885.

Gawky, adjective and noun, means left-handed; ungainly, clownish; stupid, foolish in many Scottish and English dialects. Stevenson in Catriona (1893)wrote of "A gawky, leering Highland boy." Galt from Ayrshire wrote in Legatees, published in 1820, "As for the town of Brighton, it's what I would call a gawky piece of London."

"I have been merely amusin myself with the great gawkie world," wrote Christopher North in his fascinating Noctes Ambrosianae in 1856. Inglis's Ain Folk (1895) has, from Forfarshire, "His eldest daughter, a big, gawkie, sonsy lassie." Hence gawkiness, awkwardness, clownishness, "gaucherie"; and gawkying, tall, lanky, ungainly. "The minister's wife . . . smiling good-humouredly at country gawkiness," wrote JM Barrie in Thrums in 1889.

A gawkie means a left-handed person, a ciotóg; an awkward, ungainly person; a lout; a fool, simpleton. "Gae hame an' woo some country gawkie," was advice given in one of Taylor's poems, written in Scotland around 1787. "Ye crazy gawkie!" thundered the Selkirk poet James Hogg, known as The Etterick Shepherd, who was Sir Walter Scott's friend.

In west Yorkshire, gawky-handed means left-handed, and in Lancashire it means awkward, with a tendency to fumble.