You might do something wrong but then get away scot free, able to hopscotch your way home to Scotland enjoy some butterscotch. Scotland, of course, is the nation north of England. But the other scot references there have nothing to do with the place or the people.
“Scot free” comes from an old Scandanavian word, “skot” or “shot,” that meant a payment or a tax. It was all explained back in 1475: “Scot, that is the paymente of a certeyne money to the vtilite of the lorde.” Over the centuries since, there have been some other “scot” phrases too; “church scot” (the offering you’d pay to a church), and “scot ale,” which was not a drink but a fundraising party organized by some official like a forester or the lord of a manor. There was also a Rome scot — a tax paid to the Pope — in England when it was still a Catholic country, and a “soul scot”, which was a customary payment made to the church on behalf of someone who had died. So really what’s going on with the phrase “scot free” is that somebody is getting away without paying a fine for some infraction.
The “scotch” in hopscotch and butterscotch comes from the same word, even though one is a game and the other is a candy. When it comes to butterscotch, the “scotch” is a line scratched in the top of a sheet of cooling candy to make it easy to break into equal-sized pieces. In hopscotch you’re supposed to hop over a line — which today is usually drawn with chalk, but back then was scratched into the dirt. The game has been around that long — but it used to be called “scotch hop.” “Scotch” and “hop” didn’t swap positions until the early 1800s. Maybe somebody hopped in the wrong direction.
“Scotch” meaning someone or something from Scotland has been around longer than the other versions of “scotch,” but not by much. And if you want to be polite and proper about it, some sources insist that “Scottish” is what you should use, not “Scotch.” This even though people actually from Scotland seem to unperturbed by “Scotch whiskey” or even “Scotch tape.” The Scotch in the whiskey comes from its country of origin, but the scotch in the tape comes from a 1920s slang meaning of “scotch:” economical or parsimonious. Supposedly an engineer at 3M was testing an adhesive tape by trying to use it in a paint shop. It didn’t work very well, and the painter reportedly said “Take this tape back to those Scotch bosses of yours and tell them to put more adhesive on it!” Since the tape was going to be used to fix things, which would save money, they used the name for the whole product line. It sounds a bit fishy to me, but you can find two separate citations for the story, which is probably why it stuck around.
