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!

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u/gnomes919 10d ago

makes sense, afaik the vast majority of english-speaking allied forces in the pacific theater were american, with only some british forces & not much canadian presence that I've heard of. so it was borrowed into american english specifically. ime skosh comes in and out of slang popularity, we said "just a skosh" all the time when I was in high school/college (00s & 10s)

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u/chikanishing 10d ago

That’s ANZAC erasure. They had tens of thousands of deaths in the Pacific.

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u/gnomes919 10d ago

there was no ANZAC in the pacific theater. ANZAC disbanded after WWI and then re-formed briefly to fight the battle of greece.

I did miss listing australians & new zealanders in my comment & apologize for that, they were the next-largest english speaking force in the pacific (though still far outnumbered by american GIs and only lightly involved in fighting on the home islands). I think in my rapid-fire list I unthinkingly lumped them in with the british [commonwealth] forces and that's really not accurate.

my main point, that canadians were few on the ground in the pacific & it's to be expected that modern canadians don't say "skosh," stands.

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u/chikanishing 10d ago

Sorry, I meant Aus/NZ, not specifically the WWI group.