A little bit of Scots linguistic whimsy for Burns Night, spotted way out west along the River Thames at Strand-on-the-Green...
... a fine vessel named the Peerie Dunter. Peerie being...
And so: A small eider duck.
Thanks to my handy Chambers Scots Dictionary for the definitions.
But peerie can also mean...
... a small comparatively small quantity of fluid such as a canal, say. And dunt is more commonly defined as...
(The dunt was the accepted modus operandi of the electrical layman who wished to get a clearer picture on his malfunctioning television set. At least it was when growing up in my house.)
Thus the Peerie Dunter is the perfect name for a canal boat that will inevitably, from time-to-time brush by - or dunt - the odd peerie - or duck - in a peerie. Hence the Peerie Dunter is a peerie dunter.
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