“I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was - I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.” Jack Kerouac, On The Road
Word origins
Scavenge is a
derivative of scavenger, which appeared in English in the early 16th century. Scavenger
is an alteration of the earlier scavager, itself from Anglo-French scawageour,
meaning "collector of scavage." In medieval times, scavage was a tax
levied by towns and cities on goods put up for sale by nonresidents in order to
provide resident merchants with a competitive advantage. The officers in charge
of collecting this tax were later made responsible for keeping streets clean,
and that's how scavenger came to refer to a public sanitation employee in Great
Britain before acquiring its current sense referring to a person who salvages
discarded items.
The first meaning of the word yen was an intense craving for opium
theEnglish term evolved from the Cantonese yīn-yáhn, which itself combines yīn,
meaning "opium," and yáhn, meaning "craving." In English,
the Chinese syllables were transformed to yen-yen and ultimately abbreviated to
simply yen. Eventually, yen was generalized to the more innocuous meaning of
"a strong desire," and the link to drug cravings was lost.
In Middle English, to "disparage" someone meant causing
that person to marry someone of inferior rank. Disparage derives from the
Anglo-French word desparager, meaning "to marry below one's class."
Sabotage comes
from the French word saboter which means
to walk noisily, to botch, from sabot (wooden shoe).
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