Scottish word of the week: Stookie

To most people, a stookie is a bulky, rigid plaster cast that immobilises a limb in the event of an injury, usually a fracture.

A man sports a stookie to immobilise a broken arm. Picture: TSPL

Where schoolchildren are concerned, it becomes something akin to a blank canvas for scrawls of, well, anything - doodles, drawings, and a large stream of ‘mentions’.

John Logie Baird used the head of a ventriloquist dummy, which he christened Stooky Bill, for early demonstrations of his most famous invention, the television.

A rather clumsy, inelegant prop, Stooky Bill was useful nonetheless - more than could be said for others branded with the term. A stookie can also refer to folk who are not considered to be the brightest.

The word made a recent-ish appearance on a column from our very own Juliet Dunlop last year. The headline reads: “Such a major stushie over a simple stookie”.