When it first appeared in English, the word scrumptious meant close-fisted. It owes this original meaning to its derivation from the word scrimp, meaning to be stingy, which in turn derives from a Germanic source meaning to shrivel up. In the mid nineteenth century, this original meaning faded away as scrumptious shifted its application for no apparent reason from the person being stingy to the things he is being stingy with, things like money or tasty food. As a result, scrumptious ceased to mean dose-fisted and came to mean delicious. This sort of semantic shifting is not uncommon, having also occurred with the words fantastic and nice: fantastic originally described someone with a deluded imagination but eventually came to describe a wondrous event or situation, the sort of thing a person with a deluded imagination might envision. Nice originally described someone who was ignorant but eventually, after centuries of gradual shifts in meaning, came to describe things that are pleasant (perhaps because ignorance is bliss). With scrumptious, the shift in meaning may have been facilitated by its resemblance to sumptuous, a word used since the fifteenth century to describe food that is extravagant and therefore, presumably delicious.<\/p>\n
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When it first appeared in English, the word scrumptious meant close-fisted. It owes this original meaning to its derivation from the word scrimp, meaning to be stingy, which in turn derives from a Germanic source meaning to shrivel up. In the mid nineteenth century, this original meaning faded away as scrumptious shifted its application for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-s"],"yoast_head":"\n