Snake in the Grass - The American Scholar

Snake in the Grass - The American Scholar

“Scoff your food? Means the same as bolt it down. Or gobble it. Essentially, to eat very fast and greedily.” As I explained the meaning to my two students—a meaning I hadn’t known but had instantly intuited from the context in the article we were reading and had almost as quickly looked up to confirm—as I explained the word, so similar to scarf, I wondered where it had come from and why. It likely had a different origin than scoff, meaning to mo…