Dingo the Dissident

THE BLOG OF DISQUIET : Qweir Notions, an uncommonplace-book from the Armpit of Diogenes, binge-thinker jottings since 2008 .

Saturday 18 April 2020

One of hundreds of examples

of French-English meaning-drift :

Early Modern French escamper
(to decamp, bugger off, fuck off)
gave English the word scamper
'to run or skip about briskly',
like a little lamb or puppy,
via the (English) noun scamp :
'a villain'.
A village near me in France is called Escamps,
maybe once a nest of cut-purses, swindlers, thieves, 
poachers, highwaymen - or refugees.

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