Clifford B. Hicks, Alvin’s Secret Code (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963).
The scudded in that passage has stuck in my head since I first read Alvin’s Secret Code in childhood. Here is another scudded, which I discovered much more recently:
Robert Musil, Young Törless. 1906. Trans. from the German by Mike Mitchell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
Alas, the similarities between the two works end there.
[Are clouds the only things that scud? No. Thanks, Martha.]
Friday, September 24, 2021
Two skies
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Crabs do it, scuddling sidewise across wet sand, leaving funny looking trails. So do dung beetles, especially when their balls get too big for their bodies and begin to zigzag along their paths. Cats, too, when they are arched and fluffed, running along the walls or long pieces of furniture, their bodies looking like misdrawn Halloween creatures.
Very interesting! The OED (which I didn’t check) has many uses of scud, scuddle, and scuttle.
I remember this word from Louisa May Alcott's book _Jo's Boys_.
Something educators often fail to understand: those unusual words can excite a young reader. It comes up in Margaret Edson’s play Wit with soporific (Beatrix Potter).
A word also used of small sailing boats in a brisk wind
A lovely sentence from the OED, c. 1704: “The next [person] that we met was a jolly Parson, skudding from Lambeth-House in a Skuller.”
Two other creatures that could be said to scuddle: insects seen on and in still bodies of water such as ponds or, in the case of the second one listed here, swimming pools -- pond skaters and water boatmen/oarsmen. Skaters scud across the surface skin of water; oarsmen scuddle under the surface.
The word scuddle comes to mind when I see clouds with flat bottoms moving across the sky, sometimes lazily, sometimes racing along.
Thanks for posting about this word. I'm enjoying the mind-scuddle it has sent my brain on.
And I learned more about scud than I could have imagined. I don’t think it ever occurred to me as a kid to look it up — I just liked the sound and strangeness of it.
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