Mind your language
THE Elizabethan magician Simon Forman, about whom Leslie Rowse used to go on so, was a lecherous man. In a review of a couple of new books about him, Thomas Wright noted in the Daily Telegraph that Forman often referred to his fornication by the term ha/eking, an ugly word in Mr Wright's judgment. I looked inside one of the new biographies in a shop and found a note that the origins of ha/eking were unknown.
But a wizard of a different stamp, the electronic wizard Mr Kim Fletcher, tells me that his mother Agnes recalls the word on the lips of her father, a Westmorland man. He would tell his three daughters that they had halecked about enough for one week. I was rather alarmed at this information until it became clear that there was no sexual denotation in this usage at all.
As it happens, the word is recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary in the form halok or halock. The dictionary remarks that it is Scottish, citing a line from Dunbar from the beginning of the 16th century, but admits no knowledge of its origin. The word is also in Jamieson's Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language, which records the meaning 'light, thoughtless girl' and hazards an etymology from haelga, which it claims is the Old English for the Latin inconstans. I haven't got an Old English dictionary to hand, but I don't suppose the suggestion is true, or someone at the OED would have picked it up.
Nor is it particularly Scottish (even in the sense of that northern dialect of English still to some extent spoken in the Lowlands). Good old Joseph Wright in his Dialect Dictionary lists ha/lock as a verb meaning 'to behave in a noisy, foolish way' or 'to loiter, loaf and play'. as Mrs Fletcher recalls. Wright quotes a Westmorland informant: 'He wad rayder hallak aboot t'public hoose ner work.' Ha/lacking was common as far south as Yorkshire, often coupled with stoit, as in 'a gurt hallacking stoit'. A stoit is usually 'a clumsy girl' or a word used to belittle a child showing off. The OED has a word stoit used of .a glut of pilchards; but that is not to the present purpose.
Simon Forman came from a family rooted in the south-west of England. But ha/eking or ha/lacking might well be accommodated to his hoped-for tumbling, romping and idling about with girls, or even gurt stoits.
Dot Wordsworth
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