THE ORIGIN OFSCROD

Abstract

�� In current use, scrod has two closely related senses. In the first, presumably reflecting the perspective of the fishing industry, it is a small—under two-and-a-half-pound—cod or other similar fish, as a haddock, hake, or pollack. In the other, reflecting the perspective of the fish seller and consumer, it is such a fish that has been split and boned, or filleted. In the second sense at least, scrod is probably now widely recognized in the United States, but there is a strong, and justified, popular association with Boston. In fact, as I will show, the word was formerly confined, in this country, to the eastern—but not the southern—coast of New England; it is also well established in Newfoundland, but apparently nowhere else in the Englishspeaking world. The etymology of scrod is a problem. Since a satisfactory etymology must account for the earliest attested meanings and forms of the word and also for its geographic distribution, I begin by reviewing the early—that is, chiefly nineteenth-century—evidence bearing on those points. I will concentrate on the U.S. evidence, which has never been satisfactorily assembled, and treat more briefly the Newfoundland evidence, where I have little to add to the excellent treatment in the Dictionary of Newfoundland English (DNE 1982). I then discuss the etymologies that have been proposed, and finally I suggest a new explanation which I believe accounts more satisfactorily for all the evidence. The earliest known example of scrod dates from 1841. Unfortunately, it tells us little about the meaning of the word, merely describing someone as “supplied with a few ship biscuit, a dried scrod, a bottle of good swizzle” (A Dictionary of Americanisms [DA] 1951). Somewhat more informative is a passage from Joseph Reynolds’s Peter Gott, the Cape Ann Fisherman (1856). Summarizing a boyhood fishing venture of the hero, he says: He worked diligently through the season, and after paying for his dory, his lines and bucket, and his clams for bait, his earnings at the close of the year amounted to eighty dollars, in addition to which he had a pile of nice scrods, and as many salted fish for winter as the family needed. [91–92] From this it would appear that “scrods” are distinct from salted fish but can be kept for some time. I have not been able to find any biographical information on Reynolds, but some authorial asides suggest that he was a