English: scrooge can be a verb meaning crush or press or squeeze.

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DaveAgain
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English: scrooge can be a verb meaning crush or press or squeeze.

Postby DaveAgain » Fri Jan 21, 2022 2:43 pm

I'm currently reading The wind in the willows by Kenneth Grahame. I was a bit surprised by his use of scrooged:
Something up above was calling him imperiously, and he made for the steep little tunnel which answered in his case to the gravelled carriage-drive owned by animals whose residences are nearer to the sun and air. So he scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged, and then he scrooged again and scrabbled and scratched and scraped, working busily with his little paws and muttering to himself, "Up we go! Up we go!" till at last, pop! his snout came out into the sunlight and he found himself rolling in the warm grass of a great meadow.


Wiktionary.org gives a definition that fits:
Etymology 2
Verb

scrooge (third-person singular simple present scrooges, present participle scrooging, simple past and past participle scrooged)

(UK, US, dialect) To crush or press; to squeeze (past, into, together, etc.).


Clearly Mr Dickens knew the word with this meaning when naming the principle character of his story A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge, but I did not.
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Le Baron
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Re: English: scrooge can be a verb meaning crush or press or squeeze.

Postby Le Baron » Fri Jan 21, 2022 3:25 pm

I think that somewhere along the way (probably with Dickens) there was no care for spelling of a vernacular word. The word seems to have various spellings (in US) 'scrouge' or 'scrooch'. Wedgewood's dictionary from the 1870s (a British dictionary) refers to it as 'Scruse' and traces the etymology as French: 'éscrager' (or écraser).
Last edited by Le Baron on Fri Jan 21, 2022 3:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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luke
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Re: English: scrooge can be a verb meaning crush or press or squeeze.

Postby luke » Fri Jan 21, 2022 3:31 pm

DaveAgain wrote:Wiktionary.org gives a definition that fits:
Etymology 2
Verb

scrooge (third-person singular simple present scrooges, present participle scrooging, simple past and past participle scrooged)

(UK, US, dialect) To crush or press; to squeeze (past, into, together, etc.).


Clearly Mr Dickens knew the word with this meaning when naming the principle character of his story A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge, but I did not.

I saw recently that the word was coined based on his character.

Ooh, and that's Etymology 1 in the wiktionary, but I saw it on a youtube video of academics talking about literature and word coinage came up.
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DaveAgain
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Re: English: scrooge can be a verb meaning crush or press or squeeze.

Postby DaveAgain » Fri Jan 21, 2022 3:41 pm

luke wrote:I saw recently that the word was coined based on his character.

Ooh, and that's Etymology 1 in the wiktionary, but I saw it on a youtube video of academics talking about literature and word coinage came up.
Yesterday I would have agreed, but the way Mr Grahame used it didn't seem to fit that.

I read a tale of two cities a while back, there were a number of surprising word choices.

https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 63#p165363
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luke
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Re: English: scrooge can be a verb meaning crush or press or squeeze.

Postby luke » Fri Jan 21, 2022 6:44 pm

DaveAgain wrote:the way Mr Grahame used it didn't seem to fit that.

Looking at Le Baron's post, and seeing "scrouge" on dictionary.com, I can imagine that Dickens gave his tight-fisted, penny-pinching character the name "Scrooge", based on a verb that was in circulation, and from Dickens' novel, the spelling may have been cast and the word began to take on a more particular meaning. I wouldn't want to misunderestimate that possibility.

In our native languages, we're still learning new words and additional meanings for those words. That underscores the challenge we face learning foreign languages.
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