scurf /skərf/. noun. Scaly dry flakes of skin. Any encrustation or flaky, scaly deposit on a surface. The “foul” remains when something adhesive is removed. Rarely: a contemptible person. Also: a sea trout. Probably derived from Old English sceorfan (to gnaw) and scearfian (to cut into shreds).
“Guy offered up his delicate and increasingly emotional nostrils to a familiar experience: the scurfy smell of old money.” (Martin Amis)
“Here I sit, naked under my prison garb, wads of pallid flesh trussed and bagged like badly packaged meat. I get up and walk around on my hind legs, a belted animal, shedding an invisible snow of scurf everywhere I move.” (John Banville)
“I have no heart to be left behind, not even
if Zeus himself would swear to scrape away
the scurf of age and make me young again…”
(Homer, translated by Robert Fagles)
“They were young men, subalterns, well set-up, their metal ashine and their black unmaculated by hairs, scurf or food-droppings.” (Anthony Burgess)
“In the distance before him a fire burned on the prairie, a solitary flame frayed by the wind that freshened and faded and shed scattered sparks down the storm like hot scurf blown from some unreckonable forge howling in the waste.” (Cormac McCarthy)
“Remove the scurf spots, and broil the same as given above. Use plenty of butter.” (Mary Ronald)
“After all perhaps I knew nothing of mother Molloy, or Mollose, save in so far as such a son might bear, like a scurf of placenta, her stamp.” (Samuel Beckett)
“Stanley Spencer anticipates with relish the droppings in all his pockets, the scorched stink of wheat bunt, the dark odor of blight, mealy mildew, the reek of fomes and juniper conk, of black punk rot, potato scald, bruised galls, and scurf.” (Guy Davenport)
“Already I was wondering what makes them
hunger so, for the cause of their leanness and sad
scurf was not yet manifest”
(Dante Alighieri)
“Wild heights untravelled of the wind, and vales
Cloven seaward by their violent streams, and white
With bitter flowers and bright salt scurf of brine”
(Algernon Charles Swinburne)
“There stood a hill not far whose grisly top
Belched fire and rolling smoke; the rest entire
Shone with a glossy scurf, undoubted sign
That in his womb was hid metallic ore…”
(John Milton)