Start from scratch
The idiom start from scratch first appeared in
1918. Though we use the idiom today to refer to food preparation or a rags-to-riches
life, start from scratch came from the world of sport. In a race, a
starting line was scratched into the soil. A competitor starting the race with no
handicap started on that line, from scratch.
Another scratch “we” started with is gerbh-,
a Proto-Indo-European root meaning to
claw or scratch.
Back in the day, gerbh- was employed when people
wrote or drew by scratching on clay
tablets. Eventually, this gave birth to the Greek word graphein, to write. We see graphein today in tons of
words: graph, photograph, biography, graffiti, & on &
on. After a century or three, we graduated from scratching things into clay
& wrote or drew using the graphite in pencils.
And artful scratching (originally on those same clay
tablets) gave us the word carve.
And gerbh- was also applied to the
walking motion of some crustaceans, giving us crawdad, crab, & crayfish. Their
method of locomotion, to claw one’s way,
became the word crawl. And the word scrawl, to write untidily, may have also come from that idea of
scratching provided by gerbh-.
Even telegram, monogram & hologram
can be traced back to this idea of scratching & the root gerbh-.
And because folks creating rules & such had to scratch them out in writing,
we have grammar. Even more unlikely, because magical spells had to be
written out, even the word glamour comes from this root.
In the history of language, there’s a lot of scratching
going on. I’m hoping you might comment on it all in the comments section.
Big thanks to this week’s sources: Etymonline, Wordnik, Collins Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, & the OED.
Word origins never cease to amaze! Grammar and Glamor come from the same root? My English professor mom would have loved to hear grammar is glamorous!
ReplyDeleteGreat point, Anne. Any grammarian knows grammar is glamorous (though I'm not certain where the crayfish fits in all this).
DeleteWell...that's just crazy. You take us from scratching in dirt to images of clawing crawdads to grammar to glamour. You are amazing! And always so informative. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteHi Christine - thanks for clawing at the grammatical glamour with me.
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