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• petted lip n. the expression on a sulky face (esp. of a child); a sulky mood
• gar v. make (a person or thing do something)
• hotchin, hoatchin, adj. seething, infested, overrun (with); restless, eager

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gar v. make (a person or thing do something)

“gar v. make (a person or thing do something)”

10th April 2007

Gar is perhaps most often heard in the expression 'it would gar ye grue', often said of something horrible or repellent that would 'make you shudder'. In a Scotsman article from January 2000, a journalist gives a typical example, describing the Christmas season's 'forced mass jollity - that sort of festive spirit gars me grue'. Newspapers note many other instances when a grue has been provoked, but such confessions are perhaps best left unrepeated.

Gar on the other hand can trace its existence back to the beginnings of literary Scots in the late fourteenth century and beyond, to the Old Norse verb gera 'do, make'. Early uses of the word and its variant ger cover a variety of related senses including 'cause (something) to be done', as in the following quotation from the Scottish Rolls preserved in the Tower of London (1386): 'Gyf any of thair bondys trespas in that manere the lordes sal gar it be amendyt'. The verb is also recorded in the sense 'give orders or take steps (to) do something', as in John Barbour's epic poem The Bruce (1375): 'Than ger mak our fyres bricht'. The sense 'make or cause (a person or thing to do something', still in use today, is also found in Early Scots, for example in an entry in the Highland Papers (1443): 'The said Schir Duncan sall gar the said Charlis gif his lettris of qwytcleme (quitclaim, renunciation)'.

In later use, several expressions with 'gar' have developed. A hypocrite was known as a 'gar-me-grue' in early twentieth-century Aberdeen, and if you 'gar (someone) as gude', you retaliate, as in Sir Walter Scott's The Fortunes of Nigel (1822): 'Impertinent coxcombs they are, that thus intrude themselves on the society of their betters; but your lordship kens how to gar them as gude'.