Scam from US English, precise origin unknown
It’s not possible to get through a week of news without coming across the word “scam”. Sometimes words catch on because of the sound. “Scam” resonates perhaps with “scum”, “scandal”, “scan” and “sham”. This is the synaesthesia theory of language: that we create clusters of words with similar sounds in order to invoke similar meanings. Some extend this to argue that there is an onomatopoeic thread to language where here the “s” at the beginning of “scam” gives us a hiss, and the “c” following it, gives us a percussive back-of-the-throat note of contempt.
Other linguists say this is fanciful and we should just stick to origins and distribution. That’s easy enough with most of the words you’re reading in this article but some words defy or at least resist the etymologists. “Scam” is one of them. Most of the usual authorities in the matter draw a blank. However, one untiring researcher of slang is Jonathon Green, author of many glossaries and dictionaries, and as we’re old acquaintances, I asked him for help on this one. His theory is that it comes via the inventive writing of the American author Damon Runyon. No one is ever quite sure with Runyon which of his words he gathered from the street and which he made up. One of these is “scamus”, used by Runyon in 1944, and possibly derived from “scheme”. The next reference Green has found is from 1958, in the US pulp fiction writer Elliott Gilbert’s Vice Trap. As this is the first written use of the word “scam” without any Latin trappings, a case could be made that Gilbert either coined the word or was the first to pick it up from the criminal subcultures he wrote about.
I don’t remember people I knew using the word in the 60s – it seems that it took another couple of decades to really take off and now it’s inescapable. Now, we may be at peak scam, that moment with language where we’ve enjoyed the innovation and spread of a word, just before we start to tire of it and let it drop. I was brought up at a time when RAF slang sounded to some of us carefree and dangerous. Does anyone talk of “pranging” a car any more?
