SLOGAN n. a war cry, a call to arms

Slogan is one of the many words used in English that has its roots in the Scots language. It was a war cry or rallying call by both Highlanders and Borderers and first enters the Dictionary of the Scots Language (www.dsl.ac.uk) with an example from Gavin Douglas’s Aeneid: “The slogorne, ensenye [a war-cry or signal], or the wache [watch – as in lookout] cry.” The etymology in the Oxford English Dictionary shows the origin comes from a Gaelic compound “sluagh-ghairm”, “sluagh”  a host plus “gairm” a cry, a shout. 

Later examples show how the modern form slowly came into being as shown in this 1723 extract from the Accounts of the Buchanan family: “The isle of Clareinch was the slogurn or call of war, proper to the family of Buchanan.”

In Walter Scott’s the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802-3) there is a record of the modern form as follows: “Then speedilie to wark we gaed, And raised the slogan ane and a’.” This example begins to illustrate a meaning approaching the modern sense.

W Laidlaw, writing in his Poetry from 1901, shows how, in the Borders, the term still was used as a war cry: “The hills and glens did loud resound With slogan shouts and clang of steel.”

Finally, this slightly disparaging value-judgment from the Scots Magazine of January 30, 1966: “He [Scott] popularised, if he did not invent, many of the crude anglicisations of Gaelic words and place-names – for “sluaghgairm” … and so on.”

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