Quickly now, what’s the greatest rock song of all time?
It’s a stupid question, of course, like asking “what’s two plus two?” Everyone knows the answer to that question is four, and the answer to the first question is Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone.
With that settled (and note, no correspondence will be entertained on this matter), here’s what prompted this week’s word. It was having the greatest rock song of all time worm its way into my head the other day until it got to the lines:
Now you don’t talk so loud
Now you don’t seem so proud
About having to be scrounging
Your next meeeeeeeeal
As so often happens these days, my attention was immediately diverted to another matter. Where does scrounge from? And have I been wrong all these years in thinking that it’s a peculiarly New Zealand word?
I have most definitely been wrong; scrounge belongs to the English-speaking world. It came into the language in the early 1900s, and took off during World War I. Etymonline defines it as “to acquire by irregular means”, but I prefer the Oxford Languages definition, which is “to seek to obtain something at the expense or through the generosity of others or by stealth”. That also happens to be closer to what I hear Dylan singing.
Oxford English Dictionary, not known for going out on an etymological limb, says scrounge is probably a variant of the dialectal scringe, a word that can mean either “screw up the face or hands” (mostly north England), “cringe or flinch” (southern US and English regional, says the OED), and until the mid-1850s “to squeeze violently” (northern and midlands England), a usage that is now obsolete.
What qualifies a word as obsolete is an interesting question. According to the website Language Connections, there can’t be any evidence of its use since 1755, the year Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary was published. Quite frankly, that sounds a little weird. It’s also at odds with the OED, which cites an example of scringe being used as late as 1854.
In 2017, Peter Gilliver, Associate Editor of the OED, was reported as saying, “if we can find no quotation evidence for an item that dates from 1930 or later, we label the item as obsolete.” That doesn’t mean the word will disappear from most versions of the dictionary, though. It just gets a little space plus “obs.” appended to it. I’m also assuming that 1930 just happened to be the definitive year in 2017, and that the cut-off point is updated with the passing of time.
Gilliver is a splendid example of the single-minded doggedness needed to be a lexicographer. In 2013, he was charged with revising the OED’s online version of the word run. The task took him over nine months and included 645 meanings for the verb form alone. Not satisfied with that effort, three years later he then published a history of the OED, the culmination of a decade’s work. Did I mention that he also revised at least two more of the OED’s longest word entries in between times? OED should include his name as part of the definition of indefatigable.
If scrounge isn’t related to scringe, it may be a variant of scrouge (or scrudge or scrooge), a word meaning “push” or “jostle”, and also Cockney slang for “a crowd”. Scrooge, as in “a miser”, didn’t show up till Dickens created the “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner” Ebenezer Scrooge in his 1843 novella A Christmas Carol - and even then, it took another six decades to catch on as a generic term.
Another word related to scrounge, and one that is almost uniquely New Zealand (Australians use it too), is bludge. When I was a kid, to be a bludger was to be the lowest of the low - a ne’er do well who refused to work and probably lived on the dole, or what the rest of the world calls welfare. If you chose such a life, you weren’t just bludging, you were bludging off the rest of us hard workers - the greatest crime of all. Bludge emerged shortly after WWI as a derivative of bludger, which originally meant a pimp. Bludger, in turn, was a shortening of bludgeoner - someone who beats another with a heavy stick. There, in a nutshell, is
Australia’s Sunrise news programme shows the 1970s are alive and well. (They later apologised.)
If you’ve ever felt the urge to see if you could scrape by through scrounging (or bludging for that matter), you may have something in common with Jeff Ferrell. In 2001, he quit his job as as a university professor and, without an income, spent the next eight months finding what he could on the streets of Fort Worth, Texas. He then wrote Empire of Scrounge, a book detailing what it was like getting by as a formerly well-heeled dumpster diver.
Of course, Ferrell had an advantage few people on the street share: returning to his previous life was a ready option at any time. In 2002 he took a professorship at Southern Methodist University, and today he is Professor Emeritus at an offshoot of Texas Christian University, which he joined in 2008.
He had another advantage, according to one review I read. His partner, who did have a job, covered his living expenses (mortgage, utility bills, health care), and at the end of each day he had a warm home and hot shower to come home to. He didn’t even scrounge for food.
Which raises the question: what was the point of it all? Ferrell himself is somewhat vague on this matter, possibly because he wasn’t out to make any great point in the first place. He studiously avoided contact with other scroungers and admits, at the end of it all, he had no real idea whether they were anything like him.
One thing the book did reveal was the enormous volume of usable goods that people throw away. He also noted how people’s attempts to cope with poverty were being increasingly criminalised in the US, although - in keeping with the tenor of the book - he didn’t investigate that observation in depth.
Still, credit where it’s due. I’m writing this from the comfort of a heated office in an affluent part of an affluent country. The closest I’ve come to scrounging anything recently is nicking a biscuit out of the packet yesterday when I hoped my wife wasn’t looking, and I have no intention of upping my game in that regard.
Professor Ferrell, fair play to you. You may not have rushed in where angels fear to tread, but you sure as hell went somewhere I ain’t going.
Bits and specious
Here’s a brilliant 2006 article from science historian James Gleick on how the OED’s lexicographers go about their work.
Another goodie here on how dictionaries decide which words are obsolete.
If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably read screeds on Like a Rolling Stone already. So here’s a piece from arguably New Zealand’s pre-eminent rock critic on Greil Marcus’s book on the song. Although I should warn you, it quickly becomes a piece on the song itself as well.
And here’s the trailer to a pretty fair movie about one of the most important contributors to the first edition of the OED, an insane American who’d fought in the Union Army before moving to England in 1871.
Fear of “bludgers” is alive and well.
Quote of the week
When I was living in New York and didn’t have a penny to my name, I would walk around the streets and occasionally I would see an alcove or something. And I’d think, that’ll be good, that’ll be a good spot for me when I’m homeless.
Larry David, co-creator of Seinfeld and creator of Curb Your Enthusiasm