828-1: Feedback, Notes and Comments

Thatcher’s linguistic legacy When Michael Grosvenor Myer’s e-mail arrived soon after the last issue was published, pointing out an error, I thought I was going to get a lot of messages, though only four other readers actually wrote in. The Iron Duke was, of course, Arthur Wellesley, the first Duke of Wellington, not the Duke of Marlborough. I knew that (even more so now), but I had what’s often called a senior moment, or more crudely a brain fart.

Scrumptious “I took a train trip in 1976 across the northern US,” Phil Glatz remembers. “Out in the wilds of Montana, I asked the conductor, an African-American in his sixties, if there was still time to get breakfast in the dining car. He looked at his watch, shook his head, and said, ‘you better hurry, or all that will be left is the scrumpts.’ I’ve always remembered that term, but have not heard it since, but figure it might be related to ‘scrumptious’, maybe from southern US slang.” The Dictionary of American Regional English doesn’t include scrumpt, but it does have scrumption, a variant form of scrimption, recorded mainly in the US South from 1834 onwards. It says it means a bit or scrap and is from an unspecified English dialect term, perhaps one of those listed in the piece. It’s easy to imagine that scrumption became scrumptious and this might be the missing link between English dialect and the US scrumptious. If so, we’re still left with no information how the term took on its modern meaning.

Lots of readers asked whether the term for the childhood activity of scrumping, stealing apples from an orchard or garden, was connected. It isn’t. That comes from a dialect word meaning a withered apple, perhaps connected with scrimp, to be thrifty or economise, as in scrimp and save.

Fib I wrote last time that fib first appeared in Randle Cotgrave’s Dictionary of the French and English Tongues in 1611 as a translation of bourde, which I said meant a blunder. Marc Picard commented, “That meaning is relatively recent, from the eighteenth century. The first meaning of the word was mensonge (a lie or fib) and is still given in some French dictionaries.”

“As a child,”, Ross Marouchoc e-mailed, “I was told that the origin of fib came from the anatomical fact that the smaller lower leg bone, the fibula, ‘lies’ next to the much larger tibia. I always suspected that this was apocryphal, but I thought that you might enjoy this example of the type of fib told to children by adults.”