11/07/2025
What’s on my Mind?
I woke up to a skiff of snow … thats what I am thinking about 😊.
So of course, I wondered where the word skiff came from because I’m a Word Nerd 🧐 . I then googled it and this is what I found
Skiff, meaning a light flurry or dusting of snow, is quite common on the Prairies but also found in other areas of Scottish settlement such as the Maritimes. It is a Scottish word, unrelated to the type of boat called a "skiff." The noun was derived from the verb skiff, meaning "to move lightly and quickly" (presumably because a light dusting of snow can be picked up and moved around by the wind). This in turn came from a word, skift, which was a variant of shift. In the Middle Ages, there was a divide between the English spoken by the people in Scotland and the north of England, which was heavily influenced by the Vikings, and the people in the south, whose Anglo-Saxon had much less Scandinavian influence. The Vikings could say "sk" at the beginning of a word, but the Anglo-Saxons could only say "sh," and this led to pairs of words meaning the same thing in modern English, like scream (from Norse) and shriek (from Anglo-Saxon). This is why there was a Scottish variant skif for the southern English shift.
