Today’s word of the day, thanks to the email newsletter of The Dictionary Project (https://www.dictionaryproject.org/), is canny. Canny, pronounced / ˈkæn i / (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/canny; ignore the pronunciation guide at The Dictionary Project), is an adjective that means a variety of different things, mostly depending upon the context: “careful; cautious; prudent”; “astute; shrewd; knowing; sagacious”; “skilled; expert”; “frugal; thrifty”; and a variety of other things in the Scots dialect (ibid.).

Etymonline.com says that it appeared in English in the “1630s, from a Scottish and northern English formation from can (v.1) in its sense of ‘know how to,’ + -y (2). A doublet of cunning that flowered into distinct senses in Scottish English. In the glossary to Scott’s ‘Heart of Mid-Lothian’ (1818) uncanny is defined as ‘dangerous,’ while canny, as used in the tale, is defined as ‘skilful, prudent, lucky ; in a superstitious sense, good-conditioned, and safe to deal with ; trustworthy ; quiet.’ Cannily is ‘gently’ and canny moment is ‘an opportune or happy time.’ ‘Knowing,’ hence, from 18c., ‘careful, skillful, clever,’ also ‘frugal, thrifty,’ and, from early 19c. (perhaps via Scott’s novels) ‘cautious, wary, shrewd.’ Often used superciliously of Scots by their southern neighbors (and their American cousins)” (https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=canny).

There is also a word uncanny. Usually the un– prefix indicates the opposite of something: unnatural is the opposite of natural; unwelcome is the opposite of welcome. So you might guess that uncanny is the opposite of canny, but not anymore. Uncanny appears in the “1590s, in a now-obsolete meaning ‘mischievous, malicious;’ also in 17c., ‘careless, incautious; unreliable, not to be trusted,’ from un- (1) ‘not’ + canny (q.v.) in its old Scots and Northern English sense of ‘skillful, prudent, lucky’” (ibid.). But then it adds, “Canny had also a sense of ‘superstitiously lucky; skilled in magic.’ In Wright’s ‘English Dialect Dictionary’ (1900) the first sense of uncanny as used in Scotland and the North is ‘awkward, unskilful; careless; imprudent; inconvenient.’ The second is ‘Unearthly, ghostly, dangerous from supernatural causes ; ominous, unlucky ; of a person : possessed of supernatural powers’” (ibid.).

The Heart of Midlothian is a novel by Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832). It was the seventh in a series of novels by Scott referred to as the Waverly novels.

Walter Scott was the ninth child in a family that lost six children in infancy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Scott), at a time in history when childhood deaths were far more common than they are today. He was also stricken with polio, and that left him lame. Though his family was in Edinburgh, for his health he was sent to live “at his paternal grandparents’ farm at Sandyknowe, by the ruin of Smailholm Tower, the earlier family home. Here, he was taught to read by his aunt Jenny Scott and learned from her the speech patterns and many of the tales and legends that later marked much of his work” (ibid.). This period of his life had a profound effect on his later literary work.

He returned to Edinburgh to study privately, but in “1783, his parents, believing he had outgrown his strength, sent him to stay for six months with his aunt Jenny at Kelso in the Scottish Borders: there he attended Kelso Grammar School, where he met James Ballantyne and his brother John, who later became his business partners and printers” (ibid.). At the age of 12, he began studying at Edinburgh University where he read, among other things, chivalric romances and the classics. When he was 15 he even met the Scots poet Robert Burns. Then he began to study law.

In the 1790s, he began his literary career by translating two poems from German. German romantic literature had become fashionable in Edinburgh, and Scott was enamored of it. His next step was editing: he had grown up with Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, “a collection of ballads and popular songs collected by Bishop Thomas Percy and published in 1765” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliques_of_Ancient_English_Poetry), and he began himself to collect ballads and songs from the borderlands, including ones he had heard as a child. The result was Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, published in 1802 in two volumes.

After that, he began writing poetry, both long and short, including several metrical romances, including The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field, and The Lady of the Lake.  “Scott was by far the most popular poet of the time until Lord Byron published the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in 1812 and followed them up with his exotic oriental verse narratives” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Scott).

The idea for the first of Scott’s novel, Waverly, had begun in 1805, but Scott had put it aside while working on poetry. In July of 1814, when it was published, anonymously since Scott was known at that time as a poet, it was given a relatively small print run. But it proved successful and had two more print runs in 1814. More novels followed, frequently published as by the author of Waverly rather than under Scott’s name: Guy Mannering, 1815; The Antiquary, 1816, Rob Roy, 1817, The Heart of Midlothian, 1818, Ivanhoe, 1819, The Abbott, 1820, and many more. Almost all of his novels are historical, many of them focused on historical events in his native Scotland (ibid.).

Some of these novels are quite good, although the quality tailed off towards the end of his life when his motivation for writing was primarily financial. “In 1825, a UK-wide banking crisis resulted in the collapse of the Ballantyne printing business, of which Scott was the only partner with a financial interest. Its debts of £130,000 (equivalent to £13,500,000 in 2023) caused his very public ruin.[64] Rather than declare himself bankrupt or accept any financial support from his many supporters and admirers (including the King himself), he placed his house and income in a trust belonging to his creditors and set out to write his way out of debt” (ibid.).

I read Ivanhoe as a kid—I think my mother probably checked it out of the library for me, as she did with the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Rice Burroughs, L. Frank Baum, J. R. R. Tolkien, and, in one very sad instance, Thomas Hardy (Yes, I read Jude the Obscure when I was about 11). I read some of Scott’s other novels in high school. And then I took a graduate seminar on Scott, in which I read The Lady of the Lake and The Heart of Midlothian. I recommend all of them. Scott was a canny writer.

Today’s image is William Drummond Young’s Portrait of Jeanie Deans, the heroine of The Heart of Midlothian (https://www.mutualart.com/Artwork/PORTRAIT-OF-JEANIE-DEANS/27D94E9AEB896C63E07BE0109FB2DAC8).