The Leader of the Free World has tweeted everything from Islamophobic videos to threats against North Korea, but on Monday, a curious person by the name of Scott Free was mentioned and caught the attention of the mocking world.
The upper-cased proper noun — a routinely favored practice of Trump’s to do to regular words — appeared amid a standard tweetstorm of the president’s, this time raging against his former attorney, Michael Cohen.
“’Michael Cohen asks judge for no Prison Time,’” Trump began. “You mean he can do all of the TERRIBLE, unrelated to Trump, things having to do with fraud, big loans, Taxis, etc., and not serve a long prison term? He makes up stories to get a GREAT & ALREADY reduced deal for himself, and get….. his wife and father-in-law (who has the money?) off Scott Free.”
Aside form whether or not Trump’s tweets amounted to prosecutable obstruction of justice, the question posed by what felt like the entirety of the Internet was, “who is Scott Free?” the Washington Post reported.
Who is Scott Free? According to White Pages, there are 605 Scott Free's in America. Can you narrow it down a bit?
— Eric Miller (@EJMiller707) December 3, 2018
What Trump meant, of course, was “scot-free,” a centuries-old idiom that means to escape punishment. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary was quick to fill Trump in on his mistake.
Scott Free, the dictionary said, is “some guy, probably.”
While many do make similar mistakes with the old saying, including “scotch free,” which makes it sound like it has something to do with whiskey, the phrase traces its roots back to a medieval tax called a “scot,” according to the dictionary. If you found a way around the tax, you were scot-free.
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