Meaning of “In A Scrape” phrase of Idiom, definition and synonyms use in sentence.

In A Scrape

“I was generally the leader of the boys, and sometimes led them into serapes.”—FRANKLIN, Autobiography (1771).

To “get into a scrape,” in colloquial speech, means: to become involved in any difficult, and perhaps distressful, situation, financially or morally.

In all probability, the word “scrape,” like its cognate “scratch,” is onomatopoeic. In its nominative sense, it signifies a hollow formed by deer at certain seasons, in scraping the surface ground with their forefeet. These holes often reach to a depth of half a yard, and have contributed a new word to our lang rage (Athenaum, September 27, 1862). There may be same ancestral connection between these deer “scrapes” and the habits of the reindeer of Lapland, and the Arctic belt generally, which, in winter, scrape through the snow to great lepths, to reach the tundra mosses of which they are very fond, often, in their eagerness for food, they will make hollows deep enough to hide most of their bodies.

A lexicographer, writing for the Trans-American Folklore. Society, in 1884, opined that the word signified “a rough road down the face of a bank or steep hill, [and was] used specially in regard to such as are formed by sliding or hauling logs down.” Here again, this use of the word may have been remotely suggested by the reindeer scrapes. In any case, these hollows, scrapings or scratching’s of the earth, would, at comes, become waterlogged quagmires. It is not difficult or imagine, therefore, beasts and even human beings finding themselves trapped be times in these boggy “scrapes”; and they would be extricated only with the greatest dexterity. On, such occasions one would naturally exclaim: “He has got himself into a hole!” or “He’s in an awful scrape!”