Scurryfunge

Each year I get a Page-A-Day style desk calendar. Last year’s was an instructive calligraphy model complete with a felt-tip calligraphy pen. Yes, I’m quite practiced in calligraphy now my friends.

This year, Santa neglected to bring me a new calendar so I had to pick my own. The pop-up calendar store at the mall had a mostly uninspiring collection of Page-A-Days. One did catch my eye and I ended up purchasing the “Jeffrey Kacirk’s Forgotten English calendar of Vanishing Vocabulary and Folklore.” I’m not an academic type like some of my dear readers so I don’t have a clue who Jeffrey Kacirk is, but I’m pretty sure this calendar is going to be interesting.

The first word of the year is “Scurryfunge”. Forget the meaning. I just like saying “scurryfunge”. Scurryfunge! Scurryfunge! The meaning of scurryfunge is cited from John Gould’s Maine Lingo: Boiled Owls, Billdads, and Wazzats, 1975:

Scurryfunge--A hasty tidying of the house between the time you see a neighbor and the time she knocks on the door.

I can’t tell you how many times I have scurryfunged. I just never knew doing so had such a hilarious word to describe it.

Today’s word is “aftertale”, which according to Herbert Coolidge’s Dictionary of the Oldest Words in the English Language, 1863, means postscript.