Scottish phrase of the week: Lick-the-doup
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LICK-THE-DOUP: the phrase becomes self-explanatory once you translate doup, an old Scots word that refers to the butt of something (a gun, for example), but more commonly a bottom.
It is both a noun and an adjective: you can call someone a lick-the-doup (or, if said lick-the-doup is in your company, you could ask them to “lick-ma-doup”, a popular variant of the phrase), or you could merely be describing an act of brown-nosing.
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It’s faded from popular usage somewhat; it is recalled most often from an issue of Fraser’s Magazine in 1832, a right-leaning London-based journal that ran from 1830 to 1882. In it, James Boswell, the biographer of Dr Samuel Johnson, is referred to as a “lick-the-doup”. Boswell was noted for a peerless account of Johnson’s life (it was considered at the time to be one of the best biographies ever written), but with the intimacy of his book came accusations that he fawned over the doctor. Hence: “[Professor Wilson] is what the Bailie Pyepaste calls a lick-the-doup Boswell to that colossus of learning, the Ettrick Shepherd.”
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