SCROOGE
“So he scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged, and then he scrooged again . . .” Avoid abridgements of The Wind in the Willows. These omit the very words and phrases that make it immortal. Kenneth Grahame, in 1908, did not echo Dickens, but used a word which, while meaning to squeeze something or to draw oneself tight, had existed since the 18th century, when Samuel Johnson noted its survival as a variant of scruze, to which Edmund Spenser had been partial in The Fairie Queene. There it was perhaps an amalgam of screw and squeeze: the first is of Old French origins, the other perhaps a 17th-century emphasising of quease, which, two centuries earlier, was perhaps simply onomatopoeic.
CAH