SHOCK, n.

The Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL) defines shock as:

“a paralytic stroke; a cerebral hemorrhage; a thrombosis."

The earliest example comes from Henry Johnston’s Dr Congalton’s Legacy (1896):

“The mistress of Windy-Yett had taken a terrible turn - a shock or something”.

In 1912, the Montrose Standard and Angus and Mearns Register recorded:

“The death occurred at his residence in Tain on Saturday of Dr John F. Sutherland… . Dr Sutherland, who was about 58 years of age, took a shock a week ago, and never recovered”.

And then there’s this sad report from the Carluke and Lanark Gazette in 1923:

“[The] Deceased retired from work about three years ago. Some eight months ago he took a shock which he never really threw off. He took a second shock a week ago to which he succumbed on Sunday last”.

Over seventy years later, a Traveller’s conversation was recorded by Timothy Neat in The Summer Walkers (1996):

“He’d been over in France himself - but he was a pig of a man! I think he took a shock and died twelve years before my grandfather”.

Our most recent record so far comes from Buchan Words and Ways by Alexander Fenton (2004):

“Naturally a building so near the barn, and with the midden in the middle of the close, was not free of vermin, and grannie, whose husband had died of a shock, sitting in his armchair after supper, a whilie back, had learned to cope with wee moosies as with everything else on the farm.”

This Scots Word of the Week was written by Pauline Cairns Speitel, Dictionaries of the Scots Language https://dsl.ac.uk.