I heard the word stookie on the radio the other day as was mystyfied as the it’s meaning – the context didn’t help. Forunately the person who mentioned it explained that it’s a Scottish word for plaster cast – the kind of thing you might have on a limb if you facture a bone. It’s also mention in this story on the BBC News site.
The Urban Dictionary provides this example of usage, Gonnae let me right a menshie oan yer stookie? (Are you going to let me write graffiti on your plaster cast?).
Wikitionary defines stookie as: plaster of Paris; plaster cast; (dialect) idiot; (dialect) shy person, and it apparently comes from stucco plus the diminutive suffix -ie.
Stucco comes from Italian, and means “stucco or plaster”, which comes from the Lombardic *stucki (crust, fragment, piece), from the Proto-Germanic *stukjan, *stukjaz, *stukō, *stūkō (stick, beam, stump), from the Proto-Indo-European *stAug- (stalk).
To me a stookie sounds like a more friendly thing to have on your arm or leg than a plaster cast, which is also known as a orthopedic or surgical cast. What do you think?
Northern vernacular for a plaster cast is a ‘pot’, as in, “‘E got a good braying and now ‘is arm’s in a pot.”
When I was a kid in California I lived in a stucco house– which means, at least locally, a wood-framed house with the exterior covered in stucco. Very common in the warmer parts of California.
(Now I live in Oregon, where practically every house is finished with wood siding.)
I’ve never heard of a ‘stookie’ before probably because I don’t live in Scotland although stookie is in the dictionary as being Scots for plaster of Paris, a plaster statuette.
You can see in the Scots Language Dictionary
http://www.dsl.ac.uk/dsl/
how the word has evolved in meaning to now include a modern day ‘stookie’ plaster cast.
I have heard the Northern England ‘pot’ version of stookie before mentioned by Mark but to me the only word in my everyday usage if somebody happens to have a limb in plaster is a ‘plaster cast’ or generally shortened to just a ‘cast’ – in Welsh it’s a calqued ‘cast plastr’.
I have used in the past for non-medical, setting of bones purposes the materials that they use in hospitals to plaster broken limbs and I think it was called ‘mud-rock’? It came in rolls of gauze like bandages impregnated with plaster which when wetted you applied like building up layers of papier-mâché and left to set hard.
I’ve luckily never broken any bones so I don’t know if they still use the same material now?
Yenlit, the kind of plaster you describe for broken limbs is still used to some extent, but it’s more common to use knitted fiberglass bandages impregnated with polyurethane, or bandages of thermoplastic. These are lighter and dry much faster than plaster bandages.