scotch [E17th] To scotch ‘to make something temporarily harmless’, goes back to a line from Shakespeare’s Macbeth—‘We have scotched the snake, not killed it’—and uses a word that originally meant ‘to gash’. This is not what originally appeared in Shakespeare’s text, where the word first used was ‘scorched’, meaning ‘slashed with a knife’. This was an alteration of score but this form was short-lived, and later editors wondered what on earth burning the skin of a snake had to do with it, assuming that ‘scorched’ must be a printer’s error. Scotch comes from Old French coche ‘notch’ and score [OE] comes from Old Norse ‘to make a cut or notch’. Score [OE] for twenty comes from counting by cutting notches in a piece of wood called a tally, with the word for the notch transferred to the number. The musical score [E18th] is the same word, from the old practice of connecting related staves by lines.