Sark noun shirt, shift or chemise
‘“Aye, Ellen MacKenzie once saw me wi’ my sark off birthin’ a foal, and told me it looked like the good Lord had put the wrong head to my body…”.’ (Outlander)
This word appears as serk in Old English and Old Norse. The earliest recorded usage in Scots means the male or female body garment worn nearest the skin. This is illustrated by the following quotation from John Barbour’s Legends of the Saints (c.1400): ‘Al nakit, bot [without] sark and breke’.
Early quotations show sarks being given as payment. In the Records of Perth Kirk Session (1623) we are told ‘The said Margaret ... ressaueit [received] for waigeis, ane sark and ane pair schone [shoes]’. A much more sinister way to receive a sark is recorded in The Accounts of the Burgh Treasurer of Dumfries (1650): ‘When the hair sarkes war put wpon the wyfes [witches] in the touboth’.
The sark of God might mean a surplice, but it could also be a penitential shirt, as in Allan Ramsay’s Tea-table Miscellany (1724): ‘Jockey shall wear the hood, Jenny the sark of God’. Even less comfortable was the shirt worn by Hercules in the story retold by G Myll (1492) in The Spectakle of Luf: ‘Hercules ... was ... slane be [by] his lady Dyonera throw [through] the inuennomyt [envenomed] serk scho [she] maid him to weir’.
An interesting superstition is recorded in James Kelly’s Collection of Scottish Proverbs (1721): ‘He was wrap’d in his Mother’s Sark Tail. The Scots have a superstitious Custom of receiving a Child, when it comes to the World, in its Mother’s Shift, if a Male; believing that this Usage will make him well-beloved among Women.’ You can’t help but wonder if that is what happened to Robert Burns (who uses the word sark five times in his 1790 poem Tam o Shanter - two of the references being to cutty, or short, chemises…).
Sark appears in various combinations too. For instance, a sark-neck is a collar and not necessarily a comfortable one: ‘Stiff sark-necks up to their ears’ (David Anderson’s Poems in 1826). Sark-alane means only in one’s shirt. An example can be found in Robert Adamson Lays of Leisure Hours (1879): ‘He caresna for a steek [stitch] o’ claes, For sark-alane he tak’s the road.’ Now there’s a visual.