Somewhere in the three hundred and odd pages of the new book on Focus by Australian Peet Johnson, he uses the delightful skerrick (as in not making a skerrick of a difference).
It is apparently a word used in USA, Australia and New Zealand to refer to a small fragment or amount (esp in the phrase not
a skerrick). It is suggested that it is a northern English word though I saw it mentioned in a book on Essex dialect. The sk beginning suggests Viking influence.
Somewhere in Peter Carey's History of the Kelly Gang we find the sentence
Hard days followed the butter money were all taken and not a skerrick of income generated by the alleged 60 bolts of cloth
Also in Helen Garner's Cosmo Cosmolino we read the line
Oh, perhaps a skerrick, the merest shred of curled rind, to check that it was cooked: otherwise, no.
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