Gentle scratching
My wife uses her nails to “gently scratch” our 3-year-old son’s back for ~15 mins right before falling sleep. He likes it a lot. There’s a word škrabkať in my native language (Slovak), and I was wondering if there is a similar one in English. Do we scratch our children? Doesn’t it sound weird?
Solution 1:
It isn’t official, but the verb scritch is sometimes used to mean a light, perhaps even a friendly, scratching, as if responding to an itch. Think of it as a combination of scratch + itch = scritch.
Considering that the old meaning of scritch as a synonym for screech or shriek is now considered archaic, this neologism seems to fill an ecological niche in the language. This use is reasonably well known, enough so as to find its way into the crowd-sourced Urban Dictionary.
The prior use of scritch as shriek goes back all the way to the 12th century, extending through the 20th. Here are the OED’s first and last two citations:
- A. 1250 Owl & N. 223 (Jesus MS.) ― Þu scrichest & yollest to þine fere, Þat hit is gryslich to ihere.
- 13·· Seuyn Sag. (W.) 1290 ― Loude he gan to crie and skriche [rime diche].
- 1944 W. de la Mare Coll. Rhymes & Verses 70 ― Down to the shore skipped Lallerie, His parrot on his thumb, And the twain they scritched in mockery.
- 1957 H. Nicolson Journey to Java v. 88 ― The evening breeze stirs the tree above us and we hear the keel birds scritching.
I think using scritch for the sort of thing you asked about is pretty normal today. As mentioned below in comments, Wiktionary mentions that scritch can mean “to scratch an itch”. There also appear to be counter-cultural usages with which I was not previously familiar (and am still largely unclear on). This online source, the “Cat Dictionary”, offers as an example:
The cat has an itch and is scritching it.
Miriam Moss has an amusing children’s book named Scritch Scratch, which is about head lice, of all scritchy-scratchy things! The Amazon description is:
Miriam Moss and Delphine Durand tackle the uncomfortable issue of head lice in this straightforward and very silly picture book. Miss Calypso and her class become the unsuspecting hosts of a family of those pesky parasites, but fortunately, the principal knows how to handle them. In a surprise, romantic ending, the head lice end up being one of the best things to ever happen to Miss Calypso.
The use of Scritch Scratch, or of scritchy-scratch(y), seems to follow the rule for reduplicative freezes that John Lawler mentions in his answer to this question. Whether this is the ultimate source of the contemporary slang use of scritch as related to scratch is hard to pin down for certain, though. It might also be one of those portmanteaux that show up so often, so scratch + itch = scritch. Or as often happens in these cases, it could simply be several things working together to converge on a reinforced sense.
Solution 2:
My children used to say
Itch me!
See transitive verb, definition 2 here