Scottish Dialect “Dreep” and “Dreepy” Mean Weak, Spiritless, or Gormless

Hello, you have a wherewithwords.

Hi, this is Tiffany calling from Lexington, South Carolina.

So I have a love of Mary Roberts Reinhart, so America’s Agatha Christie.

Yeah.

Which, turn of the century, murder mystery, kind of the butler did it kind of things.

Well, I’ve exhausted the majority of her work, so I’m currently reading a similar setting, murder mystery, but it’s British, and it’s by Patricia Wentworth.

And I come across a word that she used to describe one of the other characters in the novel.

And the protagonist is a young, very forward-thinking, modern, for the era woman, young lady.

And she doesn’t seem to have a lot of patience with what she is calling a DREEP, a D-R-E-E-P.

And she calls out several people in the book for this and calls them either A-DREEP or DREEP-E, like D-R-E-P-P-Y.

At first I thought, well, maybe it was some sort of British term that we turned into drip or drippy.

For the context of the story, she almost inevitably uses it to describe another woman, is they’re more hysterical than what I would think of as like an American drip or nerd, if that makes any sense.

Yeah, it really does.

Do you know the year and the title of the book you were reading?

I do. This particular one is Patricia Wentworth’s The Case is Closed. Copyright is 1937.

Well, Tiffany, I’m a little surprised that she was describing behavior that you would describe as hysterical because the words dreep and dreepy are indeed Scottish dialect versions of drip and drippy.

And since the late 19th century, the term dreepy has meant soft, ineffective, spiritless, droopy.

I’m looking at a line from a 1927 edition of the London Observer, in which somebody is described as having a weak, dreepy, drippy sort of face, obviously belonging to a man with about as much personal force as there is in a penny worth of suet.

I saw that line, Martha. If you didn’t quote that, I was going to quote that.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, hysterical is not quite the word, though.

I mean, you’ve got the one example from this book here, and the author seems to be using it just for this one character.

But in the larger aggregate use of DREEP and DREEPY, it is really about someone who is spiritless or insipid even or gormless.

They just have gotten no, they don’t stand up for themselves.

Well, there you go, Tiffany.

That is fantastic.

Thank you so much.

That helps me put it into better perspective so when I read more of this author.

Well, Tiffany, we are delighted.

Thank you for sharing your reading with us and sharing the word DREEP and DREEPY.

Take care of yourself.

Thank you so much for taking my call.

Y’all have a wonderful day.

Happy reading.

All right.

Take care.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.