Words, words, words

By Todd Stadler · Monday, May 12, 2008 9:46am

I woke up yesterday and had a very clear memory of my dream, which involved flying in a passenger jet at a very low altitude through the main courtyard of Rice University, and then climbing very steeply once we got to the end. During this rapid ascent, the writer for the Portland Mercury was commenting on the plane's abilities, and she did so using the word "scutive".

So it was that when I woke up, I was curious whether "scutive" was a real word. In the dream, it was used to mean "unnecessarily cautious" — there were those in the aerospace industry, apparently, who thought the plane we were on was not capable of the steep ascent we were making.

I had no knowledge of the word, and so I was excited at the prospect that my brain had remembered some word it had heard once, but which had been lost to my conscious memory.

Sadly, upon thumbing through my beloved (if often ignored in this digital age) unabridged dictionary, I found that there was no such word as "scutive". And while Google has several pages of results for that seemingly made-up word, they all appear to be corruptions of words like "executive" or "consecutive" as mangled by optical character recognition software.

But there was a bright side. For, unlike Google, which only shows you what you're trying to find, my unabridged dictionary has the charming tendency to send me off on wild goose chases in which, en route to paging to one word, I find another word of interest.

In this way, while futilely trying to find "scutive" in the dictionary, I found the following fantastic words instead:

Usufruct: (noun) The right of enjoying all the advantages derivable from the use of something that belongs to another, as far as is compatible with the substance of the thing not being destroyed or injured. (From Roman law; of more interest to me is the etymology, which obviously derives from the idea of using fruit.)

Tatterdemalion: 1 (noun) A person in tattered clothing; a shabby person. 2 (adjective) ragged; unkempt or dilapidated.

Futilitarian: (adjective) Believing that human hopes are vain, and human strivings unjustified. (Again, the humor is in the derivation.)