Learn English – Guidelines for the use of the slang term “cise”

I vividly remember the term scrubs being used in the late 1960s in high-school sports (in Texas) to refer to the players who barely made the team and would be extremely unlikely ever to appear in an actual game that wasn't already a blow-out win or loss. Often scrubs were underclassmen who were included on the team to get seasoning and on the off-chance that they might develop into useful players in future years when some of the current players would have graduated.

Robert Chapman & Barbara Kipfer, Dictionary of American Slang, third edition (1995), has this entry for the noun scrub:

scrub 1 n by 1589 A contemptible person =BUM [example omitted] 2 n by 1892 An athlete who is not on the first or varsity team; a lowly substitute {ultimately fr. scrub, "shrub, a low, stunted tree"; the quoted 1990s teenager use is an interesting survival or perhaps a revival based on the second sense}

J.S. Farmer & W.E. Henley, Slang & Its Analogues (1903) lists these known meanings of the word:

SCRUB subs. (old colloquial).—Any mean, or ill-conditioned person, or thing ; as adj. = paltry, mean ; also SCRUBBED, and SCRUBBY ; SCRUB-RACE = a contest between contemptible animals ; after FARQUHAR and The Beaux' Strategem (1707). —B. E., GROSE. [Examples omitted.] 2. (American Univ.).—A servant.

As late as Chapman & Kipfer, Dictionary of American Slang, fourth edition (2007), there is no suggestion that a scrub "thinks he's cool but he's not." Indeed, Tom Dalzell, Flappers 2 Rappers: American Youth Slang (1996) gives a decade-by-decade account of why any pretension to coolness is exceedingly unscrublike:

[College slang circa 1900:] scrub A second-rate person

[Youth slang of the 1930s:] scrub 1. A poor student 2. A member of the second team

[The 1970s and 1980s:] scrub A younger person, perhaps a freshman

[Hiphop era (1980s and beyond):] scrub Someone with no talent.

I can imagine someone who thinks he or she is cool—and who perhaps really is cool—denigrating someone else who allegedly thinks he or she is cool, by calling that person a scrub; but arguing that a scrub is fundamentally someone who thinks he or she is cool but actually isn't makes no more sense than saying that a square is fundamentally someone who thinks he or she is a trendsetter but actually isn't. In both cases the assertion goes against generations of contrary usage. In the case of scrub, the essence of the insult relates to the scrub's irrelevance and talentlessness, not to the person's false sense of coolness.

Is hypocorism, among English dialects, mainly an Australian usage?

The -ie hypocorism is certainly used in other dialects, but it's definitely popular amongst Aussies.

Here's an interesting and relevant podcast about a study on hypocoristics (or clippies) by researchers in Melbs and Tassie.

Is there any evidence that selfie may have a different regional origin?

It's quite possible selfie was independently coined by different people in different regions at different times.

The 2002 "selfie" was posted by Australian to a forum on ABC [Australian Broadcasting Corporation] Online. That's the earliest one we know about. The poster and photographer, Nathan Hope, posted under the hypocoristic nickname Hopey:

That's the earliest one we have written evidence for. However, when Hope was interviewed by ABC shortly after it became Oxford Dictionaries' word of the year he said he didn't come up with it. According to lexicographer Ben Zimmer:

Hope expressed genuine puzzlement that his long-forgotten forum post, complete with misspellings, had become international news, along with the photo of his busted-up lip. And he dispelled the idea that he was somehow responsible for the word. "It was not a word I coined. It's something that was just common slang at the time, used to describe a picture of yourself. Fairly simple."

So Hopey didn't coin selfie, but why would everyone think that he did? There is a common assumption that a word can be traced back to a sole identifiable inventor who forged it in a burst of creativity. While this is sometimes the case (think of Lewis Carroll's chortle, or J.R.R. Tolkien's hobbit), historical lexicographers know that far more often, the best we can do is follow the trail of evidence as far back as it takes us without uncovering an originator.

Furthermore, in this case, it's very likely that there was no single moment when the word was created, no Ur-selfie. Instead, as cellphone photography became commonplace more than a decade ago, numerous Australians probably thought to apply the hypocoristic –ie to make selfie. And it is also a good bet that, as is often the case with slang, the word traveled orally before anyone like Hopey thought to type it out in a forum that could be retrieved online by future word-hunters.

According to the Guardian:

The next recorded usage is also from Australia with the term appearing on a personal blog in 2003.

"It seems likely that it may have originated in the Australian context," [Oxford] dictionary editor Katherine Martin said.

"The earliest evidence that we know of at the moment is Australian and it fits in with a tendency in Australian English to make cute, slangy words with that 'ie' ending."

There's barbie for barbecue, firie (or firey) for firefighter and tinnie for a can of beer.

So it's quite likely that selfie was independently coined naturally by other people in Australia. And there's evidence of selfie being used in 2004 on Flickr by someone from Rhode Island, USA. There's no apparent link between Australia and this use, came into use at Flickr. Photographer Jim Krause also used the term in 2005.

All these uses were still some time before there was a cameraphone in every pocket, and the technology to upload them wasn't quite ready for the mainstream.

It's hard to say from where today's use sprang, although according to ABC:

The man credited with posting the world's first 'selfie' while asking for advice on his injured lip, Nathan Hope, says the modern solo selfie is not in the spirit of the traditional picture with a friend.

As it happens, I was the person to discover that first-known use of selfie by Nathan Hope from 2002. I also managed to dig up the actual photo too, see it here or here.