An A to Z of the Doric: an occasional series. T

Doric, the dialect spoken in the North-East of Scotland is rich in words and phrases associated with the land and the sea. Over the next few weeks I will try to illustrate some of them in an A-Z using examples of their use taken mainly from Buchan Claik, The Saut an the Glaur o't written in 1989 by Peter Buchan and David Toulmin.

TRACKIE: A teapot.

"The tae wiz nearly aye rickit an files it wiz bile't, and the trackie got affa brookie sittin sae lang on the bink." (The tea tasted of smoke and sometimes it was boiled and the teapot was black with soot being so long at the fire.)

The description above is of a metal teapot that was never far from the fireplace. The kind of teapot in the blip would have been kept safely in a cupboard and taken out only on the most special of occasions. Part of a full tea-set it was purchased in the 1930s from one of the itinerant salesmen, often Sikhs, who travelled around the farms and fishing villages of the NE selling fancy goods out of capacious suitcases.