Scurryfunge

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. To rush around tidying up the home in preparation for unexpected guests
2. Engaging in a hasty clean-up before company arrives
3. The act of hurriedly organizing and cleaning one's living space in response to a sudden visit

Etymology: Many people have shared a single dialect word as proof that the Anglo-Saxons knew the panic of an unexpected guest. Posts and "lost words" lists across the internet call scurryfunge an old English word, sometimes an Old English one. It cannot be. Its first half gives it away. "Scurry" is a young word. It grew out of the rhyming phrase "hurry-scurry," recorded from the mid-1700s, and it was standing on its own as a verb by the early 1800s. A compound built on it can be no older than that. Nothing resembling it appears in Old English, and the medieval language had no "scurry" to build with. The word's real home is American regional speech, usually placed in New England. In its popular modern sense it means a hasty tidying of the house before company arrives. Like much household dialect, it lived in kitchens and parlors more than in print, and it surfaces mainly in collections of regional vocabulary. The second half, "funge," has never been satisfactorily explained. It may be a nonsense syllable chosen for its sound, a common way for jocular dialect words to form, but no one has traced it to a source. The word's great revival came with the internet, when lists of forgotten words spread it far beyond New England. Their readers found a word for something they did every week, and gave it an ancient history it never had.