This is from the comment thread of an article about some pillaging University of Michigan fraternities…
Scathing Online Schoolmarm likes very much the word “scrambles” here. It’s the kind of mistake (distruction and other mess-ups are less interesting mistakes) that makes you think about language, about why people reach for certain words when trying to express certain things.
The writer probably meant shambles – to see my place of employment in a shambles – but also somewhere in his or her head was perhaps not merely scramble (which can have meanings having to do with making quick and sometimes desperate moves, which I suppose has some mental connection to what the marauding lads did), but also scrabble (which similarly can mean panicky random movement). This person’s place of employment will have to scramble, and it will have to scrabble through a lot of trash, to fix the mess the UM group made.
Was trample in there too? Was the desire that these visitors from one of America’s most icky football schools scram in there?
January 21st, 2015 at 12:04PM
… and then there are the eggs.
January 21st, 2015 at 12:22PM
Yes – scrambled…
January 21st, 2015 at 1:22PM
Quarterbacks can scramble, too. So can the pilots on the USS Nimitz. So can alpinists; once the hard climbing is over, they scramble to the summit.
Even I can scramble, even if it’s only my lecture notes.
What a great word! FWIW, dictionary.com says that another wonderful word, “scram,” is “probably [a] shortened form of scramble (but compare German schramm, imperative singular of schrammen to depart).”
January 23rd, 2015 at 2:20PM
At the risk of sounding like my dad, how do these ‘students” afford these vacations? Hell, back in the day, we were lucky to have $10 bucks between us to buy watered down beer. Ski resorts were a mirage…..