THE FATHER OF ALL SCROUNGERS

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 108, 8 May 1937, Page 27

THE FATHER OF ALL SCROUNGERS

According to the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, the origin of "scrounging," the new term which Mr. E. M. Rich, the Education Officer of the L.C.C, in his report on juvenile delinquency describes as typical of the changed moral atmosphere in the. modern home, is of obscure origin, says the "News-Chron-icle." It seems to have originated from a dialect form, "scrunge" or "scronge," which m£ans to steal, especially to steal apples. . ■ No doubt the word was first used by schoolboys to mark a distinction between the activities of Autolycus and those of Bill Sykes. To pick up windfalls, even to climb trees and dislodge hesitating fruit, was not the sort of venial offence that ought to be termed plain ''stealing"; "scrounging" Is akin to poaching, therefore carries with it some faintly revolutionary

flavour, as of poor peasants filling their bellies surreptitiously at the expense of the surplus possessions of rich squires. But "scrounging" would Tiardly have risen to the- dignity of a place in our national dictionaries but for the war. It. then took on some of the (unctions of an older word, foraging. And so by 1919 or 1920 (the authorities differ), "scrounging" became diffused fairly generally through society by the returning warriors as. a term meaning "to hunt for, cadge, get by wheedling, or to acquire illicitly." In due course these old soldiers became the parents of the present generation; and so, says Mr. Rich, they passed on the new word to their offspring—to become thus embedded in an L.C.C. report in part description of "juvenile delinquency."