Mary, I sent the following which fortunately has not gone through yet. I am hoping Rootsweb intercepted this post, because it came from the wrong email address ( <mailto:[email protected]> [email protected]) It should have come from <mailto:[email protected]> [email protected] . If you can please hold off sending the previous version as the most significant words dropped off, no idea how! I will rewrite and resubmit under the correct email address. So sorry to bother you, Ailsa From: Ailsa Dee [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, 23 February 2011 10:43 AM To: '[email protected]' Subject: the use of the word "cloot" I read with interest your postings about clootie dumplings. Isn't it always the way that when you hear or see a brand new word, you almost immediately start to see it turning up in all sorts of places! I was just rereading some articles I had transcribed a couple of years ago from the "Otago Witness", a New Zealand newspaper. In 1889 a man, probably from Scotland, had written the following to the press about living conditions in the goldmining town, the Nenthorn in the Otago area of NZ: The Weather may to the general reader be a subject of little importance, but when you are living in a "cloot hoose," and a gale has been blowing for two days without intermission, accompanied by rain, sleet, and snow, which penetrate the smallest slit or opening, and come in upon your floors upon which you have to sleep and sit in the shape of water and sludge, you are forced to the conclusion, that, after all, the weather has it in its power to make things exceedingly unpleasant, and suggestive of the question whether life is worth living. All I can say is that I hope these lines will be read under more agreeable circumstances than those under which they were written. Sitting upon a stone cairn without a fire of any kind, with a wet board upon your knees for a writing desk, and in a tent flapping continuously like the sails of a vessel, with' an uncertain but well-grounded feeling of doubt at heart of its safety and that of all your worldly belongings therein contained, is not very conducive to the art of literary composition, to say nothing of its calligraphic execution ; and I am sure I owe the compositor of this letter an apology for this unusual arrangement of pothooks and crooks. If a cloot is a dishcloth - dish cloot - or a large piece of cloth used for a clootie dumpling (Wigs Rootsweb posting March 2010) Two months after settlement in August 1889, when this letter was written, the Nenthorn had a fairly large population, the majority men but at least six women (though one "lady" in a beautiful slate-coloured bombazine gown, was of doubtful gender!). I would imagine that most of the inhabitants would have also lived in cloot hooses at that time. Within five years of its settlement the Nenthorn was a complete ghost town. Regards, Ailsa