Thursday, June 16, 2011

Leaving Behind A Word

March of History

The joy of a native language is hard to match.

Take the word 'scram'. One can look up the definition and determine what it means (in this case, "go away from, quickly"), but being a native speaker, one also knows in the back of one's mind the context in which one has heard or read the word; in this case, there's a hard-edged, abrasive quality that is ever so shocking.

'Scram', according to H. L. Mencken's The American Language, was coined by a Jack Conway, who is also said to have come up with "belly-laugh", "pushover", and the verb "to click" (meaning to succeed).

Will 'scram' still be with us fifty and a hundred years from now? It's fun to speculate. Jack Conway, who died in 1928, by the way, might have been on to something. At least he'd likely appreciate "LOL", "noobie" and the ubiquitous "click" of the computer age.

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