Scumfish

[petrusplancius]

I stumbled across this word in a poem by Kipling, the Road-Song of the Bandar-Log (monkey-folk - 'Brother thy tail hangs down behind!'), which contains this line

Comments

[petrusplancius]

That's good, thank you. I was inclined to think like the last person cited here that it might be a word that he simply made up for the sound. Didn't find its way into the dictionary as a result. (There was a story that someone criticized Thomas Hardy for using 'small' as a verb, and when he checked in the OED, he found that it was indeed there - with himself as the author of the only source cited! Alas, not true, there are much earlier sources.)

[ext_4099704]

This was I word I grew up understanding and heard in common usage. It describes being suffocatingly overpowered by a repugnant odour. For example, by being exposed to a particularly rancid fart one could be said to have been 'scumfished' by the expulsions of another.