RARE & DELIGHTFUL SNOW WORDS Skiff Canadian Prairie Saying: Ain’t but a skiff of snow to dust a gopher’s arsehole.
A skiff of snow in Manitoba and the Canadian West is a light snowfall, a gentle powdery dusting of snow. It is probable that early Scottish immigrants to western Canada brought the word with them, for it is still a familiar dialect word in Scotland where it means a light wind, a misty rain or a modest flurry of snow. Consider this bit of poetry by W. Tennant from 1827 “Whan skiffs o’ wind blaw aff the brae” (English: when little gusts of wind blow off the hillside). Brae also meant the bank of a river valley. Brae as a word is a gift from the Vikings. In their language, Old Norse, brá is ‘brow,’ ‘eyebrow’ or ‘eyelid.’ From the brow of a human, the meaning took on another sense, the brow of a hill. One of the Old English words for eye-brow was eaghill ‘eye hill.’ Skiff is a verb meaning ‘to skim over the surface and barely touch it.’ skiff may be a variant of the earlier verb to skift ‘to glide, to move quickly.’ Another etymological hypothesis offers skiff as a British dialect variant of shift. The Oxford Canadian Dictionary suggests its etymology as “possibly from Old Norse skipta = Old English sciftan shift (verb).” More unusual snow words next time.
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