scratchitti

[Mark A Mandel]

On Fri, 27 Sep 2002, Paul McFedries wrote:

#http://www.wordspy.com/words/scratchiti.asp

Ha! Thanks.

Poking around there I saw "regift" and thought immediately of "mathom",
a word coined, or reborn, by J.R.R. Tolkien and known to many sf and
fantasy readers. See Chapter 1 of (Book 1 of) _The Lord of the Rings_,
and somewhere in the Appendices. From OE maDm 'treasure' (long a, and D
= edh). IIRC he defines it approx as "something you have no immediate
use for but don't want to [or, which is too precious to?] throw away".
Many of the presents at hobbit birthday parties were mathoms that had
been passed from house to house many times.

-- Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoepist, and
   Philological Busybody
   a.k.a. Mark A. Mandel