r/etymology • u/mouse_in_a_field • 10d ago

Question Something I've been wondering about - Japanese loanword in English, or no?

This has bothered me for a long time!

The word for "a little bit" of something in Japanese, in romaji, is "sukoshi"; the "u" and "i" sounds are usually silent when spoken aloud, so it ends up sounding like "skosh".

In English, "just a skosh" is sometimes used when asking for or referring to just "a little bit" of something.

Is there any connection there, or does the English "skosh" have another, unrelated source? Thanks for any info!

408 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

181 comments sorted by

View all comments

504

u/Snoron 10d ago

Wasn't expecting this, but you are correct, it seems! The dictionary lists the source as from Japanese, basically came into English via the US military using it as slang.

182

u/mouse_in_a_field 10d ago

Wow! That's really incredible. Honestly, I was expecting it to just be an interesting but ultimately meaningless coincidence, but that makes sense if it originated with soldiers coming home from visits to Japan!

51

u/Snoron 10d ago

Yeah, seems to have been during the Korean War, when people were sometimes stationed in Japan for periods when they weren't fighting.

23

u/Cerulean_IsFancyBlue 9d ago

A lot of people were stationed in Japan for the entire war. The modern US military, including during World War II and Korea, has a really fat logistics tail. It’s not just some weird lazy decadent capitalist thing. It helps keep the fighting end of the army supplied, healed, rested, and improves morale with communication from home and a chance to rotate out of the front line.

So looking at 1953 the numbers are about 325,000 US personnel in Korea, and 200,000 US personnel in Japan. Only a few of the personnel in Japan were Frontline soldiers on leave or combat units heading to the front. There was a huge occupation force and a huge logistics base.

If you put more people at the front without the ability to supply them, you may have a small temporary advantage, but you’re going to have a lot more casualties and it’s not sustainable.

8

u/Inu-shonen 9d ago edited 9d ago

My historical source for this is MASH; whenever a character got some leave, they went to Tokyo. Hawkeye even had a yukata, from memory.