From: Ailsa Dee [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, 23 February 2011 12:53 PM To: '[email protected]' Subject: FW: Words dropped off previous post! 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) then the writer's cloot hoose was probably a tent! Two months after settlement, in August 1889 when this letter was written, the Nenthorn had a fairly large population. The majority were men but there were 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 been living in cloot hooses at that time. Within five years of its settlement the Nenthorn was a complete ghost town. Regards, Ailsa

In Yorkshire, a cloth is a "clout" - very similar. --- On Wed, 23/2/11, Ailsa Dee <[email protected]> wrote: From: Ailsa Dee <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [WIG LIST] the use of the word "cloot" To: [email protected] Date: Wednesday, 23 February, 2011, 3:01 From: Ailsa Dee [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, 23 February 2011 12:53 PM To: '[email protected]' Subject: FW: Words dropped off previous post! 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) then the writer's cloot hoose was probably a tent! Two months after settlement, in August 1889 when this letter was written, the Nenthorn had a fairly large population. The majority were men but there were 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 been living in cloot hooses at that time. Within five years of its settlement the Nenthorn was a complete ghost town. Regards, Ailsa ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to [email protected] with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message