This all started because while editing an article in MS Word for a veterinary journal, I noticed that the spellchecker did not recognize the word scrapie. That’s odd, I thought—it’s a reasonably common word that I (who am not given to browsing books about the diseases of livestock) have run across any number of times in my reading career. Why wouldn’t it be in the spellchecker’s dictionary? As is my wont, I went directly to the OED, where it was defined as “A subacute, invariably fatal, disease of sheep and goats, characterized by degeneration of the central nervous system, leading to uncoordinated gait and itching.” So far, so good. But the first citation was from 1910! Surely such a homely word referring to such a common rural phenomenon must have been around for centuries, and in fact the 1910 citation (from Vet. Jrnl. LXVI. 711) implies it’s not an innovation: “Shepherds and farmers.. class more than one disease with totally different symptoms under the head of Scrapy.” How can it not be attested before that?
So I thought I’d check to see how far back the comparable French word was attested, only to discover it wasn’t in any of my bilingual dictionaries. It’s not in my Russian ones either, but the Yandex online dictionary has it, and the translation they give is скрепи [skrepi], clearly borrowed from English. Do sheep not get this disease outside Merrie England? And did sheep there not develop it until the nineteenth century?
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