Matt msg'ed me a bit earlier this evening. "Have you learned your two things yet?" Alas, slack, sickie person that I was, I had not. So Matt, bless his soul, gave me a nudge in the right direction. He'd been checking on the spelling of the term "scot free" and turned up quite an interesting etymology of the phrase.
What amused me the most about this was learning of yet another example of Old English/Old Norse word pairings. (Yes, I know, this was the first thing you thought of, too. NOT. But bear with me.) You see, Old English and Old Norse, which are pretty closely related linguistically (and would become more so when the English started adopting words out of the Danelaw), both had words with the "sc/sk" letter combination in them, but pronounced them differently. Old English went for the soft sound, Old Norse for the hard. Modern English inherited them both. For an example, take a look at a word that went both directions-- the Old English "scyrte" (pronounced, roughly, SHEER-ta) and Old Norse "skyrta" (pronounced SKEER-ta) both meant the same thing originally: a tunic. Today we've got both words in the language-- shirt, and skirt.
This business of "scot free" came down to us as two words, as well... there's "scot" (from the Old Norse skot), and there's shot (scroll down a bit, it's def'n 15), from the related Old English word, scot, as in "to pay the shot" (mostly used in British English, I'll grant you). In fact, Webster's Revised Unabridged uses one word in defining the other:
Modern English being what it is, we adopted *both* words. No wonder the language is so darn complicated.
Oh... der. I got so caught up in my little comparative etymology, there, I nearly forgot about the other two terms I ran across. I mentioned before that I'm on a pirate kick thanks to my 7th Sea game... well, one way of feeding my frenzy has been to hunt down wordlists of piratical and generally nautical lingo (as opposed to just plain naughty lingo). And so I share with you two particularly colorful expressions that are both rumored to have their roots in things seamanly:
"freezing the balls off a brass monkey" and "son of a gun"
(both originally found in the Sailor Dictionary of Terms, if'n ye be curious).
And even more amusing, *both* storied origins turn out to be total, unmitigated hooey, most likely. But fun, anyway. ^_^
Posted by gris at September 5, 2004 10:59 PM