Battle cry

Battle cries are a universal form of display behaviour (i.e., threat display) aiming at competitive advantage, ideally by overstating one's own aggressive potential to a point where the enemy prefers to avoid confrontation altogether and opts to flee.

In order to overstate one's potential for aggression, battle cries need to be as loud as possible, and have historically often been amplified by acoustic devices such as horns, drums, conches, carnyxes, bagpipes, bugles, etc.

Battle cries are closely related to other behavioral patterns of human aggression, such as war dances and taunting, performed during the "warming up" phase preceding the escalation of physical violence.

From the Middle Ages, many cries appeared on speech scrolls in standards or coat of arms as slogans (see slogan (heraldry)) and were adopted as mottoes, an example being the motto "Dieu et mon droit" ("God and my right") of the English kings.

The Gaelic word was borrowed into English as slughorn, sluggorne, "slogum", and slogan.