An infanticide is described in The Justiciary Records of Argyll and the Isles (1679): “(She) killed the said infant . . . with her knife at leist strangled or smoored him some other way that he immediatly died.”
Perhaps the best-known quotation comes from Tam O’Shanter, who passed “Whare in the snaw the chapman smoor’d”.
Smooring in snow is extensively recorded in the Scottish National Dictionary and Allan Ramsay in The Gentle Shepherd (1725) warns “the thick-blawn wreaths of snaw, or blashy thows, may smoor your wethers”.
RL Stevenson (Merry Men 1887) gives the evocative image of “a mune smoored wi’ mist”. And the Edinburgh writer W Beatty (The Secretar 1897) pictures “the reek from the toun lums smooring the golden lift”. W Nicholson (Tales in Verse 1814) shifts the metaphor to the sense of smell: “Stale breath she smoors wi’ oils and mint.”
Smooring the fire was once a nightly ritual.
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You can silence a frivolous objection by saying in a disparaging tone: “If the lift fa, it’ll smoor the laverocks.”