scoff/scarf

[Benjamin Zimmer]

Note also the dialectal spelling of "scoff" as "scorf". OED cites
Hotten's Slang Dictionary (1864): "Scorf, to eat voraciously." And
Google Books has Parish & Shaw, A Dictionary of the Kentish Dialect
(1888):

SCORF [skauf] vb. To gobble; eat greedily. (See also _Scoff_.)
"You've scorfed up all the meat purty quick, ain't ye?"
http://books.google.com/books?id=CmQOAAAAMAAJ

The pronunciation given in that entry is non-rhotic, so this is
presumably a pronunciation spelling along the lines of:

<ar> for [A:] - "marm" (for "ma'am"), "barth" (for southern Eng.
"bath"), "Myanmar"
<er> or <ur> for [@:] - "er(m)...", "Winnie ther Pooh", "lurve", "Burma"
<or> for [O:] - "Eeyore" (for "(h)ee(h)aw")

Many of these non-rhotic pronunciation spellings engender rhotic
spelling pronunciations, as when rhotic Americans try to pronounce the
title of the Led Zeppelin tune "D'yer Maker" (actually a pun on
"Jamaica"), or when they read about "Winnie ther Pooh" and "Eeyore".
Also, I believe "marm" (as in "schoolmarm") originated as a non-rhotic
spelling of "ma'am", reinterpreted as rhotic. I wonder if something
similar happened with "scorf", later respelled as "scarf".

--Ben Zimmer

On 8/30/07, Paul Johnston <paul.johnston at wmich.edu> wrote:
>
> Also cf. the development of scarper "run away", which comes from
> Polari, and ultimately italian (escappare?-I know it's the cognate to
> English escape).  Again, an /r/ creeps in--twice in this case--in
> rhotic British dialects like Edinburgh Scots, and, I believe, in
> American dialects (if any) where the item has been taken in.  It is a
> common enough Cockney slang item, though, and Cockney is non-rhotic,
> so scapa with a long /A:/ might well have been interpreted as
> containing an underlying /r/, and the item is always written, when
> written,  as containing one.  If scarf comes from either scoff or
> scaff, and was originally associated with New York here, and is old
> (a lot of ifs), a similar development might have happened here as (1)
> NYC and area had the largest amount of British immigration from the
> Home Counties right into the mid 19c, and (2) in Southern Britain you
> have a lot of short a/short o interchange, particularly around
> labials--strap/strop, stamp/stomp etc.  as you do also in Scots (off
>  > aff, Tom > Tam and so on).  The combination of the tendenciers
> might well have produced scarf from scoff.
> There are non-rhotic Scots dialects too, but anything before 1900
> would be too early for this development to be involved, and most
> Scots /r/-droppers drop it only variably, so they still feel an /r/
> there.
>
> On Aug 30, 2007, at 10:34 AM, Laurence Urdang wrote:
>
> > Since the first quote in the OED for scoff is the same year when he
> > was born, it is rather unlikely (but, for some, not impossible)
> > that it was formed on the name of Auguste Escoffier.
> >   I first encountered it in the UK, in the 1970s.  Later, when I
> > encountered scarf among native speakers in the New York area, it
> > occurred to me that it was a resurrection (hypercorrection, if you
> > prefer) of the r-less form scoff by those speakers who want
> > listeners to know that they are aware there is an "r" in the
> > spelling of a word, which, of course, there wasn't---at least if
> > one compares the history of scoff and scarf in the OED.
> >   I wanted to check it in the Century, but I couldn't get it on
> > line and was too lazy to pick up the volume in the next room.
> >   Also, the meaning has always seemed to me closer to 'gorge
> > oneself; eat voraciously' than to 'eat heartily.'
> >   L. Urdang
> >   Old Lyme

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