{UAH} Scot-free or scotch-free? Or Scott Free?

Scot-free or scotch-free? Or Scott Free? Nothing to do with slavery or Scotland

 by Jeremy Butterfield.In Confusable Words, eggcorns, Help for writers & editors, Spelling, Word origins.7 Commentson Scot-free or scotch-free? Or Scott Free? Nothing to do with slavery or Scotland

(5-minute read)

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Here's a wheels-within-wheels eggcorn, or even an eggcorns-within-eggcorns eggcorn.

The standard form of the phrase is 'to get off scot-free':

Stone believes the two rig supervisors should be prosecuted, but he also thinks BP's senior leaders have got away scot-free.

And here's an example with the eggcorned version:

Every school child, and 99.999999999999% of the rest of us know the name of the ONLY country to commit nuclear genocide on innocent civilians and get away scotch-free.

And then there's POTUS's example:

He makes up stories to get a GREAT & ALREADY reduced deal for himself, and get….

…his wife and father-in-law (who has the money?) off Scott Free. He lied for this outcome and should, in my opinion, serve a full and complete sentence.

@realDonaldTrump 3:24 and 3:29 p.m., 3 December 2018

Q: Is it scot free, scotfree or scot-free?
Dictionaries hyphenate it (Oxford Online, Collins, Cambridge, Merriam-Webster).

At the end of this post there are figures showing the relative frequency of this eggcorn. Meanwhile, let's delve into scot-free's backstory.

Q: Scot-free has got something to do with Scotland, Scots, Scottish, hasn't it?
Nope, absolutely nothing, zilch, diddly squat, nada. It has nothing to do with the nationality, the language or the drink.

Q: It derives from the famous U.S. legal case involving the black American slave Dred Scott, doesn't it?

No, it doesn't. That belief is a classic example of the stories that people invent about the origins of words and phrases that then become established "fact". There are lots of such invented stories or urban myths about language, and they are technically called "folk etymology".

The Supreme Court ruled in 1857 that no black man, free or slave, could be a U.S. citizen.

Given the historic significance of this ruling, handed down before the Civil War, it is hardly surprising that its ripples were reflected in folklore and folk etymology.

Q: Oh, really!?! So, what is that scot bit, then?
It's an archaic word for a form of tax. So being 'scot-free' meant not having to pay scot, that tax, and then, more generally, not having to pay anything for whatever it might be.

(More specifically, the OED defines scot as 'A tax or tribute paid by a feudal tenant to his or her lord or ruler in proportion to ability to pay'.)

Q: OK. But what has that got to do with the modern meaning of 'without punishment or harm'?
As so often happens, people have extended the literal meaning to something more metaphorical and less specific (known by language geeks like me as 'semantic broadening').

As just mentioned, scot was a tax, and scot-free also once meant not liable for tax, and then later, more generally, 'not liable to pay anything'. In parallel, it came to mean 'escaping punishment, harm, or injury'. Here's the earliest example in the OED entry (3rd edn., June 2011) of that extended meaning.

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