The word brown, adjective and noun, has various dialectal uses in Scotland, Ireland and England. The word is also written broon in Northern England.
The are many combinations. Brown-back in Lancashire is a quarryman, whose clothes are brown; this is also a word for the fern, Asplenium ceterach to you botanists; Brown cream is a word they have in Scotland for spiritous liquor; pulse crops such as beans and peas are known as brown crops in Gloucestershire; Brown George or Brown Georgie is a coarse brown bread, also a large earthen pitcher; Brown gull is the common skua, Stercorarius catarrhactes; Brown gled is the hen harrier, Circus cyaneus; Brown hawk is the marsh harrier, Circus aeruginosus; Brown Janet is a Scottish knapsack; Brown kitty or brown kitty-wran is the wren; Brown money was used in Ireland long ago for copper coins; brown paper-man was a gambler who played for small money; Brown shellers or shillers are hazel nuts; Brown swallow, the swift, Cypselus apus.
A covey of partridges is called a brown in East Anglia; they have the phrase to fire or shoot into the brown there. There are some interesting compounds. A brown-back is a quarryman, whose clothes are brown. Brown-bess was the name given to the old flint-lock guns. Brown paper men were low gamblers in Victorian times. Mayhew in London Labour and the London Poor (1851), says that they “played for pence, a shilling being a great go”.
Brown is found in many interesting phrases. The Brown Man of the Moors, is a dwarf, a subterranean elf, "a fairy of the most malignant order", recorded by Sir Walter Scott in his Minstrelsy (1802). In Yorkshire milk from the brown cow is rum in tea. To play or boil brown was used of broth or soup when rich; from Scotland the EDD gives, "Did she, [the witch] but once hint that her pot played nae brown . . . a piece of meat was presented to her." To look brown at one is to look with indifference. An Aberdonian verse of 1790 contains "Tho' now he looks at me fu' brown."
A brown day is a dull gloomy day in northern and midland England.
Most of us topers will be familiar with Newcastle Brown; brown is ale or porter. An Aberdonian versifier named Still in a collection named Cottar (1845) has, "Swig a pint o' stoutest brown To you an' yours." An Ayrshire ballad of 1846 mentions "Barrils fou o' nappy brown." And Lumsden of Lothian, in a collection called Sheephead (1892), mentions "Nips or caups of foaming broon."
*wordsweuse@irishtimes.com
