Sair adjective sore
‘“You’re back late, Mac Dubh,” said Murdo Lindsay, voice rusty with sleep. “Ye’ll be sair tuckered tomorrow.”’ (Voyager)
We have many records of sair - with numerous variant spellings ranging from sare to soire - indicating how frequently it appears in written records. The form derives most probably from Old English sār ‘sore’, with the spelling o for Old English ā: a common development found also in the development of such words as Old English āc ‘oak’, hām ‘home’, stān ‘stone’, and late Old English lāng ‘long’ (see also the related Old Norse sárr), where Scots has aik, hame, stane and lang/laing respectively, retaining the old spelling. However, the pronunciation has changed since Old English times.
Several entries indicate that many meanings of sair equate to those of present-day English ‘sore’. Even so, there are many citations that seem to be more characteristic of Scots, even if they were once found in dialects south of the border. One example is the adjectival usage, exemplified by this citation from the Glasgow Herald for 2004: ‘It’s a sair day when the Scots government haes tae be telt by the Cooncil o Europe’s Comatee o Experts tae uphaud and promote the Scots language’. And the adverbial use - now no longer deployed in standard English - is especially frequent in our citations as in this one from Liz Lochhead’s translation of Euripides’s Medea (2000): ‘canna sleep greets till she can greet nae mair/ stares at the cauld grunn greets again greets sair’.
And there are distinctive Scots idioms. Although the expression ‘like a bear with a sore head’ is (according to the Oxford English Dictionary) common in varieties of English, the expression ‘sair heid’ (in various spellings) is characteristically Scots, from The Complaynt of Scotland (1550), through an Orkney witch trial from 1643, to Robert Burns’ Death and Dr Hornbrook (1786): ‘Tippence-worth to mend her head, When it was sair’. Perhaps the most relevant citation is from James Mactaggart’s Scottish Gallovidian Encyclopedia (1824): ‘A confounded sair head, proceeding from the effects of taking the wee drap’. Since poor Mactaggart was dismissed from his day-job as an engineer for drunkenness, the quotation seems sadly apt.