What is scurf?

Reading time: About 2.5 minutes

Increase your vocabulary and you’ll make your writing much more precise. That’s why I provide a word of the week. Today’s word: scurf.

I read the book Tinkers by Paul Harding in 2010, the same year it won the Pulitzer Prize. Although I didn’t  find the plot — about an an elderly clock repairman and his father who had been a tinker — particularly engaging, I was captivated by the writing. Here is a sentence I noted in my reading journal:

When he realized that the silence by which he had been confused was that of all of his clocks having been allowed to wind down, he understood that he was going to die in the bed where he lay.

Isn’t that beautiful writing? This week, my good friend Eve was excited to tell me that she’d just read the book and learned a new word, scurf. I must have skidded over it, because I’d never heard  the word before. Or maybe the issue is it was hidden in a 346-word sentence (really, don’t try this at home, kids) and I simply overlooked it. Here is the sentence:

He imagined his own sleeping form, imagined that if one could pan back from peaceful face to bird’s-eye view, one could see the supine figure floating not upon the vastness of a dark ocean of sleep but reposing in the vastation itself, the soul or whatever name one cared to give it divested of the boy, so that what seemed reposing body was simply the most likely image of whatever named soul, freed of its salt like seawater evaporating in the sun, so that the actual body, resting in bed, sighing, mumbling, came to be more like a scurf, more like that saline column of myth, while the soul or whatever one named it reattached itself in some way to the actual thing of itself like a shadow, as if when his waking self walked down the street on the way home from work, the shadow he made, of man with a paper bag holding six oranges under one arm and a small bouquet of lilies beneath the other, was some reduced version of himself, which, freed from its simple two dimensions defined by an obscurity of light, a projection of dark, would be autonomous and free to move independent of the silhouette cast by the man, and which, for all he knew, when the sun went down and the lamp was turned down, when all light, in fact, was removed from possibly coming between the body and the planes and surfaces upon which its form might projected by sun, lamp, or even moon, actually did; he saw no reason to doubt that his shadow dreamed just as he did for the reason that he could imagine himself to be a shadow of something — someone — else and that perhaps even his sleep, his dreams, constituted his duty as a shadow of someone else and that perhaps while that someone else dreamed, he was free to live his waking life, so that this alternating, interdependent series of lives formed a sort of intaglio; the waking day of each shadow was the opposite side of its possessor’s sleep. 

A late Old English word, the noun scurf refers to flakes on the surface of the skin that form as fresh skin develops below. You might see scurf drifting off your arms or legs during especially dry weather, or more likely, you might see it sprinkling from your head in the form of dandruff. Thought to be traceable to the Danish word skurv, the Middle Dutch scorf, and the Old High German scorf, it is probably also related to the  Old English sceorfan meaning “to gnaw.”

Scroll to Top