From Scratch

A recent news item opined that some Republicans wishing to scuttle the Affordable Care Act might be planning to "start from scratch." Do you suppose that meant they would begin by putting a band-aid on a minor scratch?  No, probably the writer meant they would "begin anew." But how did this meaning develop?

Scratch is a blend of two Middle English words, scratten and cracchen, both of which meant to “scrape or dig with claws or nails.” From this definitioin the noun scratch was derived, meaning “a slight tear in the skin.”

The phrase start from scratch originated in the sporting world, around the eighteenth century, where the starting point was denoted by “scratching” it into the ground. This might apply to the starting point for a race, the marking of batting and bowling creases in cricket, or the indication of the boxers’ positions in a prizefight. The first recorded instance of scratch being used as a sporting term was in 1778, in “The Hambledon Song,” an ode to cricket by the Rev. R. Cotton, who wrote:

            Your skill all depends upon distance and sight,

            Stand firm to your scratch, let your bat be upright.

The first athletes said to “start from scratch” were two runners in a handicap race in Sheffield, England, who were so described in a December, 1853, issue of The Era, a sports newspaper.

Golfing took up the word scratch, to apply it to a golfer who has a zero handicap. (A handicap is a number to be deducted from the actual number of strokes a golfer makes, to derive his final score. The handicap is calculated by one of several complicated systems that evaluate a player's skill relative to other players.)

 

By extension the phrase starting from scratch came to mean beginning any task under the assumption that no previous measures had been taken aimed at completing the task.

Nowadays you also hear it used for culinary terms, like “scratch biscuits,” that is those made without using a prepared mix.

Oh, about those Republicans trying to fix the health care system by starting from scratch, the Bard of Buffalo Bayou, crank that he is, has this to say:

            O, send me somewhere,

            With Obamacare,

            Where the doctors don’t charge any fee,

            Where seldom is heard

            A Republican word,

            And the drugs on prescription are free.

            Please, send me somewhere

            With real news on the air,

            And not weird Breitbartian views,  

            Where Walter Cronkite

            Can be heard every night,

            And there’s not a peep from Fox News.

   

            Yes, send me somewhere,

            With no orange billionaire

            Surrounded by sycophant hacks,

            Where Bannon and Flynn,

            Conway and her kin

            Are all just alternative facts.

Sign of the Times

An intellectually voracious customer of the blog points out the great ambiguity we exhibit in deciding what to call the # symbol.  You know, it’s the thingamajig right above the 3 on most keyboards and in the lower right-hand side of most telephones.

Usually in North American it’s called the pound key. That is probably because of a nineteenth-century telegraph coding system, in which the British symbol for a pound sterling (£) was used to shift from letters mode to numbers mode.  When adopted in the United States, the £ symbol was arbitrarily changed to #. Sometimess it was still called the pound key, but it also took on the name of number sign.

But there are plenty of other names and purposes for this symbol.  It has been confused with the other meaning of “pound” and is now used following a number as an indication of weight, as in 5# of sugar.   

When it comes before a number, as in #2 pencils or Apartment #4-B, it’s a number sign. 

Outside of North America, it’s often halled a hashmark.  Twitter and other social networks have adopted this usage in their “hashtags” system of organizing messages on the same topic.

Other names and uses for the symbol include:

-Cross – English-speaking Chinese typically use this     

     nomenclature.

-Hex – Commonly used in some parts of Asia.

-Octothorp – This term was invented in the 1960s by Bell 

     Labs engineers as an inside joke.

-Sharp – A similar, though not identical symbol, is used in 

     music to indicate a key designation.  The sharp symbol 

     actually differs in the angle of the horizontal crossstrokes.

-Space – a proofreader’s symbol indicating the need for a 

     space between words or lines.

Yet more names for this useful glyph are crosshatch, fenceposts, garden gate, mesh, flash, grid, pig-pen, tic-tac-toe, scratch, hak, oof, sink, corridor, crunch, and punchmark. You’ll have to figure out for yourself what the oof, hak, sink, crunch and punchmark are used for.  They’ve got me stumped.

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou is never stumped, although he is often stomped upon, unfortunately, to little effect. 

AUTOMATED TELEPHONE ANSWERING SYSTEM:

   “Thanks for calling: now before you speak,

    Please notice that this menu changed last week.

    First, if you know the number of the line

    You want, press '1' and then the '#' sign;

    This activates the direct-dialing mode,

    Then you can dial the seven-digit code.

    If you just know your party's name, you’d better

    Press a ‘2’ and then the name’s first letter.

    If you wish to hear all this repeated,

    Just say “Repeat again,” and when completed,

    Wait seven seconds, then you press the ‘4’

    And in a while you’ll hear it all once more.

    If you’re unsure of what you want, then you   

    Must press the '*' to hear a new ‘Menu.’

    If all else fails and you need help, why then

    Press '5' and then the '#' sign once again,

    When prompted, then you just say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’—”

    Oh, never mind, I hung up long ago.