What scampers?
Mice scamper, right? Running around quickly on their fleet little feet? People seem to agree that they do.
Do kittens scamper? Puppies? Cats and dogs? Horses?
How about very small prehistoric horses? Charlotte Perkins Gilman thought so – here’s the start of her “Similar Cases”:
There was once a little animal,
No bigger than a fox,
And on five toes he scampered
Over Tertiary rocks.
They called him Eohippus,
And they called him very small,
And they thought him of no value—
When they thought of him at all
My wife wouldn’t say that dogs scamper (I asked her), but Jessica Suzanne Stokes would; in “Strolling (2020-___)” she wrote,
Eventually, we brought dog and cat treats so each block
we’d meet a friend we earned unfairly. We sought out any company that
might wag and scamper with us.
Maybe a marmoset scampers? T.S. Eliot thought so – here’s from “Whispers of Immortality”:
The couched Brazilian jaguar
Compels the scampering marmoset
With subtle effluence of cat
Certainly there are things that do not, cannot, scamper, yes? Things that merely crawl, and not quickly? Someone hold a séance and tell Robert Browning – in “Caliban upon Setebos” he wrote,
Then, when froth rises bladdery, drink up all,
Quick, quick, till maggots scamper through my brain
(Which has, by now, I guess, been accomplished.)
Do body parts scamper? Your hands, your feet, your tongue? Do your eyes scamper? David Tomas Martinez thinks so – here’s from “Love Song”:
Upwards our eyes scamper,
a reflex action,
when inserting an object
in the mouth,even when the object
is a gun.
Did some feeling in you scamper when you read that last line? Tracy K. Smith would allow the possibility – in “I Don’t Miss It” she wrote,
And that scamper of feeling in my chest,
As if the day, the night, wherever it is
I am by then, has been only a whirOf something other than waiting.
Humans, as whole entities, scamper, of course. William Wordsworth, in “The Prelude: Book 2: School-time,” wrote,
In wantonness of heart, through rough and smooth
We scamper’d homeward.
And what would that scampering have looked like?
Take a moment now and scamper. Can you? How would you? (I’m not asking you to upload a video, but on the other hand I couldn’t stop you if you did.)
Are you scampering away from something? Or towards something? Or are you just scampering around?
Can you use scamper any old where? You can use it in a poem, obviously. You can use it in casual conversation (such an instance brought the word to my mind for this word tasting in the first place). Can you use it in a sermon? In a political speech? In an annual report? It seems playful, undignified. I think there are contexts for which it is too cute, too camp. But is that just me?
Is scamper the sort of word of which, the more we try to capture it or uncloak it, the more it escapes?
When we seek its etymology it most certainly is.
Scamper scampered onto the English tongue in the late 1600s. It may have come from military slang. Its earliest sense was ‘run away’ or ‘decamp’ – or, to use an older synonym for ‘decamp’, ‘discamp’.
Hmm. Discamp. Scamper. Could it be?
Well, it could… one of the proposed possible etymons is Middle French escamper, and another is Italian scampare. Both mean ‘leave’ or ‘escape’. But…
Well, escamper is from the same root as decamp and discamp, both of which connect, yes, to camp in the military sense, which in turn is from Latin campus, which originally meant ‘field’.
And scampare is thought to be from Vulgar Latin *excampare, which is, they say, a variant of *excappare, which has as its root not campus but cappa ‘cloak’. This *excappare is also the source of escape. Its origins thus literally mean ‘uncloak’ or ‘take off the cape’ – and yes, by the way, that means excape is etymologically altogether justified, even though it’s not accepted in Modern English.
But wait – there’s more. There’s a proposed possible Dutch etymon, schampen, but that means ‘graze’. I don’t know if it has anything to do with schaap meaning ‘sheep’. If sheep scamper at all, it’s not while grazing, is it?
And then there’s scamp. We know this word as a noun meaning ‘vagabond’ or ‘rogue’; the noun comes from a slightly older verb scamp, which somehow meant ‘go about in an idle way’, often implying mischievous intent. And that verb seems to come from scamper.
Oh, and when scamps get caught, what will they do? Scarper, I’m sure – which comes from Italian scappare ‘run away’ (yes, from *excappare), possibly influenced by Cockney rhyming slang, which used Scapa from Scapa Flow in place of go. But will they, when scarpering, scamper? Oh, you tell me. Scamper is a word of senses both expansive and fugacious.
Sesquiotica 