• sark •
Pronunciation: sahrk • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Noun
Meaning: 1. (Noun, Scots English) Shirt, (woman's) shift or slip. 2. (Verb, Scots English) To apply roofing underlayment, called sarking.
Notes: This word has been around for a long time and ended up in several words, but itself came to roost in Scots English and northern British dialects. It isn't to be confused with sarky, which is slang for sarcastic. However, sarkless has been used in the past meaning "shirtless".
In Play: Americans are familiar with this word only in the name of a Scotch whiskey developed especially for us, called "Cutty Sark". It was named after a famous clipper ship then docked in London and now in a maritime museum in Greenwich. The ship was named after a character in a famous poem by Robert Burns, "Tam O'Shanter", who is chased by a witch wearing a cutty sark "cutoff, shortened blouse". You might hear something like this from an elderly Scotsman: "The lass was wearing a silken sark wrought wondrously in some faraway land."
Word History: Today's Good Word was serk in Old English when it was combined with bera "bear" to create berserk. This word may have been influenced by Old Norse berserkr, referring to wild warriors who wore bearskin hides when they went into battle. Old English serk was probably a borrowing from Old Norse cognate serkr, perhaps a metathesized version of skyrta "skirt, shirt", which came down to Swedish skjorta "shirt", Norwegian skjorte "shirt", English shirt and skirt. All these words derived from PIE (s)ker-/(s))kor- "to cut", also behind Greek kerein "to shear, cut off", Lithuanian skirti "to separate" and kerti "come off", Latvian cirvis "axe", and English shear and short. (Now let's thank our old South African friend Chris Stewart for finding today's unusual Good Word and sharing it with us.)
