I too am Sikh and tired of these puns . <| sep |> I live in Scotland so I ' m perfectly aware of the modern preferred usage . Though in the 1600 s when the ScotchIrish Americans first came into being Scotch was a common word for Scottish people . It only began to be considered archaic in Britain c . 1850 . This just reinforces my point the ScotchIrish Americans mostly claim descent from immigrants in the 1600 s 1700 s , and not today ' s Northern Irish nor today ' s Scots . A lot has happened in Irish and American histories in terms of culture and politics since , and so it isn ' t right to insist that one identity has to retroactively apply the emergent terminology of another when they are separated by so many centuries and so many miles .