“Great Scot” is an exclamation used to express surprise, amazement or dismay, in the way people might otherwise say “good heavens” or “goodness me”. It was especially common from the second half of the nineteenth century into the early twentieth, and today it reads as distinctly old fashioned, the kind of thing said by a character in a period drama rather than in everyday speech. It carries no literal meaning about anyone actually called Scot or Scott; it is simply a burst of astonishment, and can be used for good news, bad news or simple bafflement.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘great scot’?
The phrase is generally regarded as a minced oath, a way of avoiding a direct swearword by substituting a similar sounding but harmless word. Linguistic analysis of the exclamation concludes that it functions as a disguised way of saying “God”, placing it alongside other American exclamations of its era that softened blasphemy into something more socially acceptable.
Where the “Scot” element came from is less settled. It has traditionally been linked to two real men of that surname. One is the novelist Sir Walter Scott, and an explicit tying of his name to the exclamation appears in a poem published on 15 August 1871, the centenary of his birth. The other, and the one more often named, is the American general Winfield Scott, a physically striking man said to have stood six feet five inches tall and to have weighed as much as 300 pounds by the end of his life, which made “great” an apt description of him quite apart from any wordplay.
Tracing the phrase in print has proved difficult, and the accepted starting date has moved a long way. The second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary had the earliest example as an 1885 line from F. Anstey’s novel The Tinted Venus. In October 2015 the researcher Peter Reitan pushed that back by four decades, finding “Great Scott! is it possible that we ever promised to publish this law” in the Spirit of Democracy, a Woodsfield, Ohio newspaper, on 7 March 1845. That date sits awkwardly with the Winfield Scott theory, because it comes before the Mexican War made him a household name. The earliest known link between the general and the exclamation is later: the lexicographer Barry Popik records a Quincy Whig piece of 19 July 1852 reporting that the phrase “is said to allude to Gen. Scott, the Whig candidate for President”. With the documented record moving this much, earlier examples may well still be found, and no single origin story can be stated with certainty.