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scrob
[< Irish Gaelic scrábaim]
DCHP-2 (May 2016)
Spelling variants:scraub, scrawb, scrab
v. — Newfoundland
to scratch; to tear flesh with nails or claws.
Type: 2. Preservation — The Newfoundland English verb scrob is a preservation from the Irish Gaelic "scrábaim" or "scrabhaim", meaning 'to scrape, scrawl or tear' (Dinneen 1927: 985). Many such Irish words made their way into NLE when migrant fishery workers from southeast Ireland began permanently settling in the province in the 17th and 18th centuries (Clarke 2010b: 7). Kirwin (1993: 76) notes that some of these words can be spotted in older Newfoundland sources; however, the number in common spoken use today is diminishing. Scrob is one of the few terms that is still in use, even by the younger generations (Kirwin 1993: 77). While the majority of written sources show the term as a verb, scrob may occasionally be used as a noun. Internet search results show that the term is most frequent, by a considerable margin, in Canada (see Chart 1).
See DNE, s.v. "scrob", COD-2, s.v. "scrob", which is marked "Cdn (Nfld) & Irish".
See DNE, s.v. "scrob", COD-2, s.v. "scrob", which is marked "Cdn (Nfld) & Irish".
Quotations
1956
He is a playful little dog that runs around and jumps on you. [...] When I whistle to him he bites and scrobs, and then licks my face.
1997
The Blazer was better. It still swung the tail out just like any rear drive, but the front scrabbed away at the snow trying to bring things back into equilibrium.
2007
"He was shell-shocked!" I countered, feeling Uncle Bill's spirit was up over me, looking down, proud of me. "In the Great War," I said, wanting to scrob the big man's dangling wart and make it bleed all down over his face.
2008
It was almost entirely out of use by the end of the First World War, although such current Newfoundland parlance as "hangashore," "scrawb" and "gob" are Gaelic in origin, and in the 1980s folklorists were still finding singers in St. Mary's Bay, on the southern Avalon Peninsula, who could belt out songs in Gaelic.
2010
The off-kilter Newfoundland dialect, rendered here in a collapsed form with a minimum of apostrophes, sets the keynote. "Sot" is used as a past form of "sit" and people are always "after" doing things. There are fights where people are expected to "scrob or kick," while others get knocked into a "cold junk."
References
- Clarke (2010b)
- Kirwin (1993)
- Dinneen (1927)
- COD-2
- DNE
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