“Ah’ve heard o sookin in wi the boss Smithers but this is takin it ower far. Yir fired!”
Translate:
sook: sycophant, crawler, toady, to fawn and flatter.
“I have heard of sucking up to the boss Smithers but this is taking it too far. You’re fired!”
![[sook spelled out in the phonetic alphabet.]](/comics/phonetics/sookph.gif)
The Scottish Word: sook with its definition and its meaning illustrated and captioned with the word used in context in the Scots language and in English.
(This is a Scotstober 2024 Word.)
All of the Scotstober words illustrated for week three are available to scroll through on a single page here.
We use it in my family to describe someone who is a big softie, or the dog who loves cuddles “what a sook”
While it can be derogatory, it can also be in jest or as a more mild mannered “insult”
Growing up in Toronto in the 1940s a taunt to other children who hung back was to call them “sookie babies” implying they were still on the breast or pacifier which I didn’t know then. It’s only after reading Stuart MacBride Scottish mystery novels I realize what people do – sook their fingers after eating, or babies etc.
My Scottish granny and granda would tease us children by referring to us as “sookie”. It was meant as “sulking”, like when we were denied candy. We’d have “a sookie face”…
In New Zealand the word “sook” is used to taunt children who are perceived to be frightened, scared, retiring from situations which others in their group regard as OK or bold. So someone who shies off from an action such as a tackle in rugby could be described as a sook.
“He dunked a custard cream then sooked off the rind of mushy biscuit.”
From Stuart MaCbride’s Close to the Bone.
What is sook off, in that sentence?
sucked
There’s an academically researched whole host of meaning from the most common to least used on the Dictionary of Scots Language site here:
https://dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/souk
but Don Hutton’s New Zealand usage above posted in 2020 of being a useless player in a team is new to me. It could infer -‘as timid as one who is not weaned yet’ I suppose.Or an adaption of the American insult ‘You suck!’.
Sucked it off, probably loudly with great enjoyment.