Transcript of “Mooching: Shopping or Cadging?”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Yes, hello, Martha. This is Andrew Nelson from Williamsburg in Virginia.
Well, hello, Andrew.
Hi, Andrew. What’s on your mind?
Yeah, well, as you can gather from the accent or lack of accent, you know, I’m sort of interested in the way in which language and words have evolved. And particularly, you know, there’s one word, I mean, most words I’m sort of fairly conversant with as to how they’ve gone through. But there’s one word in England which is mooch, which basically means window shopping. But I gather it has some more sinister connotation over here.
Sinister? Wow.
Maybe more negative, I don’t know, but sinister. What did you gather it means in the United States?
My understanding of over here is that it’s almost like casing the joint ready for stealing things.
Not quite.
You might mooch a cigarette. I don’t know if you’re casing a cigarette. You might mooch a sawbuck, whereas you would catch a tenner in the UK. But yes, I mean, that word is much more sort of general in there. So as I say, it’s like a window shopping sort of thing. So you just have a mooch downtown and just basically just while away at the time while looking window shopping and everything.
Yeah, somehow I picked up both meanings of the word. You know, it’s hard. Martha and I always have this problem where we play around with our own language so much. We’re not quite sure where we pick stuff up. And so we had a cat who was always mooching around the kitchen in my house. That’s what I would call it. He mooched around like a dog always looking for food that had fallen.
Absolutely.
And so I have that meaning of mooch in my vocabulary, in my idiolect. But, yeah, an American English mooch typically means to get something without paying for it by sponching off of other people or borrowing, you know. It may imply laziness or lack of ambition and taking advantage of other people.
Yeah, I’m just wondering how, you know, the divergence happened, you know, because I’m assuming, obviously, that it originated in the U.K. and has worked its way over here. Obviously, it’s been said many times, separated by the common language, which, by the way, is the source of a great conversational language. There’s a blog by the linguist Lynn Murphy, who is an American professor working in the UK, married to a British man, and she specializes in cross-dialect differences. And she tells a similar story of going around on her hen weekend, which we don’t use in the U.S., before marrying her lovely British husband. And she talks about her friends having a mooch around the shops, just as you say, as part of their hen weekend. And for them, it was just a kind of retail browsing for the fun of it, hoping to strike on something good.
That’s right.
But the how is just the same old story, which is we are indeed separated geographically, and particularly for the language that’s less common or it has a kind of a underworld or subculture life to it. It tends to diverge faster or diverge more often anyway. And mooch isn’t common enough to keep its meaning in the mainstream. The common words that are more mainstream stay more consistently between the two countries. They’re more even.
Well, Andrew, thank you so much for asking about this. And as somebody who is a fish out of water in the United States, we expect you to call more regularly with comments on how English in the two countries differs.
Thank you both. It’s very nice to talk with you both.
All right. Take care of yourself. Bye-bye.
Bye.
