Sharg noun a runt, weakling; adjective feeble, stunted
‘“I havena the slightest notion,” she replied crisply. “If I had, I should have sent men to hunt the ill-deedie shargs down by now.”’ (The Fiery Cross)
Sharg is defined as a stunted, starved-looking person, a tiny mischievous creature, and the weakest of a brood or litter. However, most of the quotations show a suffixed form. Joseph Tennant, in Jeannie Jaffray (1909), writes: ‘Wad a shargar tailor daur [dare] insult an honest man in his majesty’s service!’. And, in the Brechin Advertiser of April 1889, we read: ‘A shearger wean was little Jock’.
Used as an adjective, shargie is defined as thin or shrivelled. Here it means stunted: ‘Half o’ the loons [men] are shargert wi’ hard work…’ (Alexander Robb, Memories of Mormondside, 1920.) In agricultural circles it is also the name of a wasting disease of sheep. An example comes from James Robson’s General View of the Agriculture of the County of Argyll (1749): ‘The Sharg, or decline; the sheep linger a long time before they die of it’. And still with beasties, a shargar-tae is the toe grown by a crab or lobster after losing its original one. It is never quite the same as the original and is not generally eaten.
Sharg or scharge is cited more commonly in A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, where one poignant quotation concerns a woman whom a mother: ‘askit help to hir bairne that wes ane scharge and scho send furth hir sone to gether fochsterrie leaweis [foxglove leaves] quhairof scho directit the bairnes mother to mak a drink’. Basically, the desperate mother of a failing child asked another for a remedy and was advised to give the child a drink made of foxglove leaves. The fact that this 1623 quotation comes from Pitcairn’s Ancient Criminal Trials in Scotland from AD 1488 to AD 1624 suggests that it didn’t go too well.
Sharg was borrowed into Scots from Gaelic searg (meaning a puny creature). Other Scots words for runt or weakling include cricklet, crickling, dorneedy, draiglack, rickling, tailag, titlin and wallydrag.