scrutatious

Are you scrutatious?

You know what scrutatious means, of course. I just used it in my tasting of harrumphery and I heard no squawks. To define: ‘characterized by or disposed to scrutation; inclined to intense study or thorough inspection’. (Scrutation, of course, is the act of giving scrutiny – the OED defines it as “minute search or examination.”) 

That monocle-with-eyebrow-raised emoji, 🧐, is iconically scrutatious. Which means pick, pick, pick, always picking at things. Why must you pick so much? Why are you so scrutatious?

Huh, when you put it that way, it almost sounds trashy.

Well, hey, there’s nitpicking and then there’s trashpicking. Nitpicking may have a negative tone, but in the real world, removing nits is a very good and caring and helpful thing to do, because they hatch into lice if you don’t. Trashpicking, on the other hand… say, did you know that there was a self-described, self-appointed “Dylanologist” who regularly picked through Bob Dylan’s trash when Dylan lived in New York City? Dylan moved out of town in no small part just to get away from the guy. This kind of obsessive “fandom,” where you go through the flotsam and jetsam of a life just for the sake of your own mastery of it, is certainly the apex of scrutatiousness. Or, rather, the nadir.

And there are other areas of life that are similarly subject to the gimlet eye of the scrutatious. Language is one such. Grammatical pedants and etymological trashpickers make life needlessly unpleasant without any true benefit for others. But it’s not that being scrutatious is inevitably bad; a person who has the inclination but is well balanced about it might become a good safety inspector or editor (sometimes the same thing).

And a good etymologist or linguistic historian is also scrutatious in a good way: looking at the origins of words to know, for instance, that the scrut- root in all these words (and others) comes from Vulgar Latin scrutor, which appears to come from Late Latin scruta ‘rubbish, broken trash’ – which would mean that scrutiny etc. refer in their origins to picking through trash. (There are competing theories, though, that might yet trash that one.) A bad etymologist will insist that scrutatious must therefore refer to literal trashpicking, but that’s a load of rubbish. 

OK, so how scrutatious are you are about language? Well, tell me this: how common a word is scrutatious? How many dictionaries is it in?

The answer is that it is in zero (0) dictionaries. And if you Google it, you get three results, and one of them is my word tasting note on harrumphery, and another is (or will be) this very thing you’re reading right now. The third is the comments section of a post from 2006.

Some lexical trashpickers might conclude on that basis that it’s not a word. But obviously they’re wrong. I used it and you (probably) understood it, and you (probably) didn’t even question it. It is a word that always existed in potential and was just waiting for people to notice it and use it. That’s not so inscrutable, is it?