Quote:
Originally Posted by Stitchawl
Breakie to start the day, dindin to end it. 
All sorts of words for 'food.' 'Scran' (Stuff Cooked by Royal Australian Navy,) 'Chow,' the corruption of the Chinese term to stir-fry, 'Sh$t on a Shingle' ( Military name for creamed chipped beef on toast. The list is endless.
Stitchawl |
'Scran' is a word I've heard and used for a long time for food. Certainly here in the Midlands of the UK and also where I used to work, in the North East. I assumed that this wasn't because of the acronym you quoted, so I looked it up (
here);
Quote:
Scran has long been used as slang in the British army and navy for rations. ....
The first recorded sense of scran, from the early eighteenth century, actually refers to a reckoning at a tavern. By the early 1800s the word was being used almost exclusively in relation to food. The implications seemed always to be that it was inferior or scrappy food, odds-and-ends, leftovers, and the like. It might be a scratch meal taken by a labourer into the field, or perhaps some miscellaneous items for a holiday excursion or picnic, as well as those soldiers’ and seamen’s rations.
It was widely used in London in the nineteenth century. An example appears in a letter by the Victorian social writer Henry Mayhew that was published in the Morning Chronicle in November 1849: “Others beg ‘scran’ (broken victuals) of the servants at respectable houses, and bring it home to the lodging-house, where they sell it.” If you were out on the scran, you were begging food; you might have a scran bag to hold your gleanings. There’s also the Anglo-Irish bad scran to you, an imprecation that curses you with ill luck, literally wishing bad food on you. And scran bag has long been used in the Royal Navy for the place where confiscated personal possessions or lost property were kept until retrieved or sold.
Unfortunately, as often is the case, we have no good idea where the word comes from. A link was once suggested with the Icelandic skran, rubbish, odds and ends. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests this is probably an accidental similarity, even though the English Dialect Dictionary — based on fieldwork during the later nineteenth century — includes the sense of a morsel or scrap, for example quoting “A scran of a moon hung dead in the south” from an 1881 story.
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It is, of course, entirely possible that the word evolved in exactly the way you suggested in a different part of the world, perhaps with some help from the longstanding link to naval tradition.
I do love etymology
