Git

The term is largely confined to the British Isles, where it has the broad sense of “a worthless person” (always male), commonly preceded by the adjectives “idle” or “stupid.” It originates as a variant form of get , recorded in Scots from the early sixteenth century in the sense of “bastard.” The remarkable swearing match, the Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy (ca. 1503) contains this damning insult: Fals tratour, feyndis gett
[False traitor, devil’s bastard]
(l. 244)

An abbreviation of beget, get is through most of its early history a specially northern and Scottish word, also found ca. 1570 in a Scottish poem, “The Treason of Dunbarton”:

Ganylon’s gets, relicts of Sinon’s seed.
(I 171)

The references are to two great traitors in world history: Ganylon betrayed the great French hero Roland at the Battle of Roncesvalles in 778; Sinon betrayed Troy. Joseph Wright’s voluminous English Dialect Dictionary (1898–1905) gives instances in Scottish and northern use in the senses of “a child, especially in contemptuous use, a brat; a bastard,” including the harshly punitive “Tak that, thou Deils [Devil’s] gaet” from John Mackay Wilson, Tales (1836). In a curiously contemporary utterance in a series of songs entitled The Gentle Shepherdess (1725), Allan Ramsay alluded to “Whingeing getts about your ingle side [hearth]” (song 5).

As the word filtered southward, it lost both intensity and currency. In his Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785), Captain Francis Grose included it under the phrase “one of his get; one of his offspring or begetting,” but did not elaborate. The term revived in modern times in the form git , greatly generalized and having entirely lost its denotation of illegitimacy. It is rare in American English, and virtually unknown in Australian and South African English.