“SCROUNGING”

Manawatu Times, Volume 62, Issue 105, 5 May 1937, Page 13

“SCROUNGING”

According to the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, the origin of “scrounging,” the new term which Mr. E. M. Rich, tlie Education Officer of the L.C.0., in his report on juvenile delinquency describes as typical of the changed moral atmosphere in the modern home, is of obscure origin. It seems to have originated from a dialect form, “scrunge” or “scronge,” which means 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 flav

Influence of The War

our, as of poor peasants filling their bellies surreptitiously at the expense of the surplus possessions of rich squires. But “scrounging” would hardly have risen to the dignity of a place in our national dictionaries but for the War. It then took on some of the functions of an older word, foraging. And so by 1919 or 1920 (ibe authorities differ), 4 ‘scrounging” became diffused fairly generally through society by the returning warriors as a term meaning “to hunt for, cadge, got by wheedling, or to acquire illicitly.” In due course these old soldiers became the parents of the present generation; and so, saj's Mr. Rich, they passed on the new word to thcii offspring—to become thus embedded in an L.C.C. report in part description of “juvenile delinquency.’*