Scofflaw, Litterbug, and Jaywalker

MAS once asked me if I knew what a scofflaw was. Little did she know this is a word that enters my judgmental mind every day. Turns out it has a rather weird etymology:

"SCOFFLAW

A person who flouts a law, especially an unsustainable one.

There have been many competitions down the years encouraging people to coin new words, such as the one here on World Wide Words earlier this year. Few of these creations ever take a permanent place in the language, because they have to meet an obvious need or catch the public's imagination to be successful. Scofflaw has achieved this difficult feat.

A contest was held in Boston in 1923, during the Prohibition era, to find a descriptive word for "a lawless drinker of illegally made or illegally obtained liquor". A prize of $200 was offered by Delcevare King of Quincy, a rich Prohibitionist, to find such a word in order to "stab awake the conscience" of those who drank alcohol.

Since $200 was a sum not to be sneezed at, more than 25,000 entries were received from all over America and beyond. The winner was announced on 15 January 1924; as scofflaw had been sent in by two contestants, the prize was divided equally between Mr Henry Irving Dale and Miss Kate L Butler.

H L Mencken mentioned the competition in his work The American Language, and commented that "The word came into immediate currency, and survived until the collapse of Prohibition". As any modern dictionary will relate, it has survived rather longer than that, though these days it often refers to persistent offenders against parking laws and other minor regulations."

For me, it's the jaywalkers and litterbugs (two more interesting words).

"The word jaywalker is able to be traced back to 1917, though it may have been in use as early as 1900. It is generally considered to have originated in the United States, possibly from the city of Boston. It is a compound word of the words jay and walk; in this context, jay is used in the obsolete slang sense, referring to a stupid or dull person, or a rube, i.e. someone from a rural area and not familiar with "city ways". At the time, vehicles and traffic signals were a new concept, gaining popularity in the larger cities, so this term would have been used to describe newcomers who were unfamiliar with these recent developments and by extension, to ridicule people who behaved like newcomers but should have known better."

"LITTERBUG -- "'Litterbug,' meaning someone who habitually litters, is an anonymous coinage, probably based on firebug, dating back to the end of World War II. It owes its popularity to the Lakes and Hills Garden Club of Mount Dora, Florida, which used the slogan 'Don't be a litterbug!' in a 1950 roadside cleanup campaign." ." From "The Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins" by Robert Hendrickson (Facts on File, New York, 1997). "litterbug n (1947) someone who litters public areas with discarded rubbish. Originally US. The mainly British equivalent 'litter lout' is first recorded in 1927. 1947 'New York Herald-Tribune': 47,000 subway 'litterbugs' pay $107,000 in fines in 1946 fines." From "20th Century Words: the Story of the New Words in English Over the Last Hundred Years" by John Ayto (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999)" 

(Although I think a lot of recycling is more political/social than practical or helpful to the environment.)

I suspect those who use the MUNI without paying would fall into this category. As well as those who download copyrighted material our copy music or movie (damn!).