Sesquiotica

“Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you do the Fandango?”

Well, he may or may not, but either way, he’s sure to boast about being the absolute best at it. That’s what Scaramouche (also spelled Scaramouch) does. We may think of Scaramouche vaguely as a mischievous character, or perhaps more to the point as a lowlife scoundrel, but the original Scaramouche, a character in the travelling Commedia dell’Arte troupes performing in France in the 1600s (he had a different name in the original Italian, but we’ll get to that), was in particular a conceited braggart of a soldier and – as conceited braggarts generally are – a coward.

So you can picture Scaramouches through history. 

In the 17th century, being a soldier was a common occupation, and a Scaramouche would be sure to boast about any skirmish he had been in – a mere bar brawl in which he received a kick to the pants would be transmuted in the telling to a glorious raid on a tavern in which he prevailed.

In more recent times, when sport has generally replaced military action as the main vehicle for civic pride and competition, a Scaramouche might more likely regale the bar with tales of the stomping he delivered in the football scrimmage the night before – a stomping he more accurately received.

And now in the world of business, a Scaramouche might talk about how he came out of the latest agile scrum with everyone following his lead and hanging onto his words, when in fact the phrase most often directed at him was not “That’s right!” but “Let’s put that in the parking lot.”

And in that other world of combat, politics? We know exactly what a Scaramouche would say, and much of it is not printable in a polite medium: vulgar braggadocio, with plenty of invective against his enemies. For examples, if your sensibilities aren’t especially delicate, google Anthony Scaramucci.

As it happens, Scaramucci is also the Italian name from which Scaramouche was taken – well, almost. The Commedia dell’Arte character was Scaramuccia, with an a on the end. His name meant ‘skirmish’. In fact, his name was the origin of the word skirmish.

Yes, that’s right. There is debate as to where scaramuccia came from – some propose a German origin, others say Lombardic or Frankish, but the true path of this rogue word has been lost in all the little linguistic sallies and raids of history – but the word gave rise both to the character Scaramuccia, who became Scaramouche, and also – and earlier – to the French escarmouche, which also means ‘skirmish’ and is the immediate source of English skirmish, which we have had since the 1300s.

But why stop there? English didn’t. Like the wanton wanderings of warriors on the field, fighting willy-nilly and making a mess of the best battle plans, this word entered into several more exchanges and took on subsequent forms under the influence of other English words. Scrimmage, for one, which started as another form of skirmish referring to little random battles and ended up on the football field. That morphed into scrummage, which was adopted by rugby for its combative huddles. From that we clipped scrum, which went from a disorderly tussle to a disorderly crowd to a press of journalists around a politician, and finally became a term used in “agile” project management.

Now, that’s quite the etymological fandango. And I’m not making it up.