Scrabblepoor

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Yasmeen from Escondido, California.

Welcome to the show. What can we do for you, Yasmeen?

I was wondering if you could tell me anything about the word Scrabblepore.

So Scrabblepore, where did you pick it up?

I was out having lunch with a friend. Her name is Carol.

We were celebrating her 70th birthday, and she was telling me a little bit of back history about her family, how, I believe it was an aunt or an uncle, and they grew up around the Appalachian Mountains.

And she was trying to describe how they pretty much had nothing. They weren’t very rich people, and she described them as a very scrabble-poor family.

And I tried to ask her, you know, scrabble-poor, I’ve never heard that before, what exactly does that mean?

And she was kind of struggling to describe it herself.

So it stuck with me, and I just really wanted to find out what it meant.

So this is really, really poor, just having to scrape and scratch for everything.

Well, many of our listeners will have heard of hardscrabble.

Do you know hardscrabble, Yasmeen?

I don’t.

Hardscrabble is often used as an adjective to refer to very much the same thing.

A hardscrabble life is a life where you’re constantly struggling.

You’re constantly trying to provide food and shelter and the basic necessities of life.

And it is traditionally collocated or associated in this country with poor rural life.

Hard scrabble life typically means a farmer whose land doesn’t really produce and who has got a lot of kids that they can’t really feed and that sort of thing.

But the important part of both of these words, both scrabble poor and hard scrabble, is the scrabble itself.

And it’s connected to a wider number of meanings and several hundred years of history of the word scrabble having to do with scratching in the dirt when it refers to animals.

But when it refers to people, it’s kind of an extension of that going back to the 1600s.

It’s just a pure struggle or stumbling, or you might say he scrabbled up the hill.

And then by that you mean he was having a hard time with his hands and his feet getting good purchase, and maybe the rocks were tumbling, and he wasn’t quite making the progress that he wanted and kind of slipping back every once in a while.

It’s literally that idea of kind of just everything’s against you, and no matter how hard you try, you’re hands and feet at the earth trying to make a go of it.

You’re scrabbling.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

Oh, my goodness.

Yeah.

That’s really neat.

So literally crawling your way through life.

Yeah, literally.

Like, just imagine somebody scratching.

And in the case of farmers, literally scratching at the earth trying to make the drought go away, hoping you plant the seed and hoping beyond hope that there’s enough water to make the corn grow.

Yeah, it’s a powerful word.

Thank you so much for letting me come on the show.

I listen to you guys all the time.

I love the show.

Thank you for your call, Yasmin.

We really appreciate it.

Thanks, Yasmin.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Bye.

877-929-9673.