Sc. [f. KALE + YARD. The strictly Sc. form is kail-yaird.]
1. A cabbage-garden, kitchen-garden, such as is commonly attached to a small cottage.
1725. Ramsay, Gentle Sheph., II. iii. A green kail-yaird.
c. 1730. Burt, Lett. N. Scotl. (1754), I. ii. 33. A fit Enclosure for a Cale-Yard, i.e. a little Garden for Coleworts.
1800. A. Carlyle, Autobiog., 472–3. A Lady Bute, while a widow, had got them [trees] planted in every kailyard, as their little gardens are called.
1816. Scott, Old Mort., xxxviii. What comes o’ our ain bit free house, and the kale-yard, and the cow’s grass?
1894. Lucy B. Walford, Ploughed, 42. The little rough gravelled approach and kail-yard.
2. Used with reference to a class of recent fiction, affecting to describe, with much use of the vernacular, common life in Scotland; hence attrib. as Kailyard School, a collective term applied to the writers of such novels or sketches; kailyard dialect, vocabulary. Hence Kailyarder, -ism.
[The appellation is taken from the Scottish Jacobite song ‘There grows a bonnie brier bush in our kailyard,’ from which ‘Ian Maclaren’ took the title of the series of short stories ‘Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush’ (1894), which was an early and popolar example of this school of writing.]
1895. J. H. Millar, Literature of Kailyard, in New Review, April, 384. Mr. J. M. Barrie is fairly entitled to look upon himself as pars magna, if not pars maxima, of the Great Kailyard Movement.
1895. Blackw. Mag., June, 922/1. Those romances in dialect, very fitly and cleverly called the literature of the kailyard by a recent critic.
1896. Dundee Advertiser, 1 Aug. Having been assured by many critics that the Kailyard School is quite photographic in its reproduction of Scottish life and character.
1896. Westm. Gaz., 7 Nov., 3/2. Among its contributors lately has been … one of the minor ‘kailyairders.’
1899. Academy, 7 Jan., 3/1. But Mr. Crockett is no Kailyarder in his romances. Ibid., 14 Jan., 50/2. A little outburst of Kailyardism.
1900. Athenæum, 9 June, 709/3. He wrote as he spoke, and his kailyard vocabulary occasionally baffles his editor.
