dawbake

   Special terms of address sometimes live on in dialects. There are several examples of ancient Devonshire terms in Dandelion Days, by Henry Williamson. An old woman screams at a man: ‘Ye girt dawbake. Master grawbey! Thou girt loobey.’ Williamson tells us that ‘the tirade of this ancient scold included obscene words that had been learnt in childhood from her father and mother.’ ‘Girt’ in these expressions is ‘great’. Dawbake is presumably a form of ‘dawpate’, i.e. (jack)daw head. To call someone a ‘daw’ in former times was to imply either that he was a simpleton or that he was very lazy. In Scotland the word was applied to a sluttish woman. Williamson uses ‘dawbake’ again in his Dream of Fair Women: ‘“Go on, ye old dawbake,” he urged. “Wake up, ye mazidawk.”’ This is a boy talking to his drunken father.