the.com/scrub
A man who wants you but can't spend a dime on you, immortalized by TLC in 1999.
means To cancel or dismiss someone (or something) as unworthy — originally, to call a guy a cheap, deadbeat wannabe who talks a big game but never shows up with the goods.
from "Scrub" meaning a low-grade, stunted or inferior thing goes back centuries in English — a scrub was literally a small, scraggly bush or runty animal unfit for proper use, from the same root as "shrub." That sense of puny and second-rate carried into American slang, where by the 20th century "scrub" labeled a substitute player or inferior worker. TLC's 1999 hit "No Scrubs" crystallized the modern meaning — a broke, lazy guy who talks like a baller but can't back it up — cementing "scrub" permanently in the pop-culture dictionary as shorthand for worthless swagger.
- origin
- TLC's No Scrubs popularized the term
- definition
- guy who thinks he's fly, also broke
- key trait
- hollers from a car he doesn't own
- modern use
- now any low-effort, no-ambition suitor