Norse, Old: Ergi|Ergi (noun) and Norse, Old: argr (adjective) are two Old Norse terms of insult, denoting effeminacy or other unmanly behaviour. Norse, Old: Argr (also ) is "unmanly" and ergi is "unmanliness"; the terms have cognates in other Germanic languages such as , , arag, or arug.
To accuse another man of being Norse, Old: argr was called scolding (see Norse, Old: [[nīþ]]) and thus a legal reason to challenge the accuser in holmgang. If holmgang was refused by the accused, he could be outlawed (full outlawry) as this refusal proved that the accuser was right and the accused was Norse, Old: argr. If the accused fought successfully in holmgang and had thus proven that he was not Norse, Old: argr, the scolding was considered what was in Old English called English, Old (ca.450-1100);: eacan, an unjustified, severe defamation, and the accuser had to pay the offended party full compensation. The Gray Goose Laws states:
Although no runic inscription uses the term Norse, Old: ergi, runestone Vg 67 in Saleby, Sweden, includes a curse that anyone breaking the stone would become a Norse, Old: rata, translated as a 'wretch', 'outcast', or 'warlock', and Norse, Old: argri konu, which is translated as 'maleficent woman' in the dative.[1] Here Norse, Old: argri appears to be related to the practice of Norse, Old: seiðr[2] and represents the most loathsome term the runemaster could imagine calling someone.[3]
In modern Scandinavian languages, the lexical root arg- has assumed the meaning "angry", as in Swedish, Bokmål and Nynorsk , or Danish . Modern Icelandic has the derivation Icelandic: ergilegur, meaning "to seem/appear irritable", similar to Bokmål ergre, meaning "to irritate". (There are similarities to the German , "annoying, annoyed", and Dutch , "irritating" and , "to irritate".) In modern Faroese the adjective Faroese: argur means "angry/annoyed" and the verb Faroese: arga means to "taunt" or "bully". In modern Dutch, the word has become a fortifier equivalent to English very; the same is true for the old-fashioned adjective in German, which means "wicked" (especially in compounds as "malicious" and "unsuspecting"), but has become a fortifier in the Austrian German. The meaning of the word in Old Norse has been preserved in loans into neighboring Finnic languages: Livonian ārga, Estonian and Finnish , both meaning "cowardly".