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Yummy and scrummy
Professor David Crystal
Yummy and scrummy - childhood terms for the taste of
food. I remember using them when I was a kid. They’re
actually quite old – well, a hundred years or so – they’re
late 19
th
century – is the first time I’ve found a reference
to them from ‘yum, yum’ - ‘yummy’ from ‘yum, yum’ -
first, referring to delicious food, of course, and then to
attractive people. That became a usage in the 1990s,
which was quite fashionable for a while. People talked
about ‘yummy mummies’ – that is, the perfectly-groomed
woman who goes to yoga classes, stays slim, has clean
children and has a four-wheel-drive. And other usages
came in too – ‘I’ve got a very yummy job’, people might
say, and recently, I heard somebody talking about
somebody who had a very yummy blog on the internet – in
that sense, it means, sort of, delightful and attractive,
rather than delicious.
Well, ‘scrummy’, anyway became modelled on ‘yummy’. It developed in
the early 20
th
century some years later, again, originally with reference to
food – scrumptious, you see, it’s a derivation from that word, which
means delicious. People talked about ‘scrummy cakes’ and ‘scrummy
recipes’, and then, started using it as an adjective too, more than
‘yummy’ did, you know, ‘that was scrummier’, ‘this is scrummiest’. I have
heard ‘yummier’ and ‘yummiest’, but ‘scrummier’ and scrummiest’ seems
to be more common! Something ‘sounds scrummy’. There are ‘scrummy
TV shows’ now. The word, evidently, has moved on!
© British Broadcasting Corporation 2007
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