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Great Scott!

A reader asked:

Could you please tell me the meaning and/or origin of the phrase "Great Scott"?

Other readers replied:

War Slang, by Paul Dickson, Pocketbooks (c) 1994, described "Great Scott" as an allusion to General Winfield Scott, hero of the War of 1812 and the Mexican War. He was the Whig candidate for President in 1852 and campaigned with great swagger and vanity. He was jeered as "Great Scott" during the campaign, which he lost to Franklin Pierce. Both this book and the Oxford English Dictionary also cite the term as "an expression of surprise", but the Oxford English Dictionary goes no further.

A Browser's Dictionary, by John Ciardi, published as A Common Reader Edition by The Akadine Press, 1980, doesn't approve of the allusion of the expression "Great Scott" to Winfield Scott. A Common Reader Edition indicates that "Great Scott" is derived from the German expression "Gruess Gott!" and that it has been an Americanism only since the 19th Century. This suggests a borrowing from the greetings exchanged by German Immigrants, their cordiality contributing to the exclamatiory sense of the American adaptation. [Capital Scot advisory: Several on-line searches trying various arrangements of the terms "Gruess Gott" and "Great Scott" yielded no results. Perhaps the print media are still ahead of us on this one?]

For further information and variations on the foregoing discussion, please see articles at the following locations:

• Article, "Great Scott", on the following page (http://www.plexoft.com/SBF/G03.html)>
• Civil War Trivia (http://www.15thnewyorkcavalry.com/trivia.htm) [Capital Scot advisory: Link no longer active on 8/23/02)]

Thanks to the readers of The Capital Scot who contributed to this feature.

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