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SUSIE DENT: Scurryfunge: Few words can be more useful at Christmas than this one, borrowed from U.S. dialect where it means to hastily and frenziedly tidy a house just before guests arrive.
Some 28 years have passed since I took my seat, rigid with fear, in Countdown’s Dictionary Corner for the first time and waited for the TV cameras to turn to me. A newly fledged dictionary editor at Oxford University Press, I was a reluctant addition to the hit Channel 4 words and numbers game show, having resisted my boss’s suggestion that I audition on at least three occasions. I am happiest when flying below the radar — but there I was. Somehow, I got through that first afternoon and, as the show’s resident lexicographer, that corner is now my second home.