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Chris -- 2018-04-11
Looking over CNN’s “scenes from the field” images by media photographers today, I came across this unusual usage in a caption:
“Scram at the hospital for a Schumacher statement on January 1. Gear left at the entrance as all media scram for a statement”, says CNN’s Woj Treszczynski.
http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/05/world/gal … le_sidebar
The scene is of temporarily abandoned photo gear. The journalists have clearly scrammed. The idiom I know is of a media scrum. The etymological pedigree for a scrum is via scrummage <- scrimmage <- skirmish. The only scram I know is vamoose, and is derived from scramble. A media scramble makes as much sense as a skirmish. I think we may be witnessing the birth of an eggcorn, since the few hits online are very recent.
August 19 2013
OP: Should be fun, media scrams always are. For the moment local counterparts are camped trying to find if Filner is back in office.
R: The press slang she means is “scrum”. I guess “scram” is outside baseball.
R2: Is a media scram like one of them pressers where they all scram into one place?
http://www.conservativecave.com/index.php?topic=90080.0
Maybe it was born as a transcript error.
SHOWBIZ TONIGHT in London tonight with the late-breaking details. Here`s CNN`s Phil Black with the latest worries about Winehouse.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
PHIL BLACK, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Rushed to hospital followed by media a media scram – another day in the tumultuous life of Amy Winehouse.
Transcript from CNN 2008
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A back-formed scram from scramble(d eggs) also seems reasonable to me for the sort of turmult the media can produce.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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