3rd
Today’s Favorite Word …
THE PASSAGE
“Four years is a long time in Beijing, a city frantically reinventing and rebuilding itself. The poplars have filled out into a wall of green that seems no more or less dishonest than the strips of woods I grew up with in America, concealing subdivisions and the interstate from one another.
The air has gotten cleaner, too — not clean, not even close to what most Americans would call clean, but not the unbroken, choking fug of 2004.”
THE DEFINITION
fug, n.
colloq. (orig dial. and School slang).
A thick, close, stuffy atmosphere, esp. that of a room overcrowded and with little or no ventilation. Also fug-footer, -soccer, -socker School and University slang, indoor football.
1888 E. F. BENSON Sks. fr. Marlborough i. 16 Seating himself in the most comfortable chair, as a consolation for the prevailing fug. 1905 C. RANGER-GULL Harvest of Love i. 10 He met a group of school-house boys carrying a round football. They had been playing ‘fug-soccer’ in the racquet courts. 1914 C. MACKENZIE Sinister St. II. III. viii. 663 Nigel had booked himself to play fug-socker with three hearty Trindogs of Trinity. 1915 ‘BARTIMEUS’ A Tall Ship iv. 78 We get up quite a good fug in our case~mate at night. Ibid. ix. 171 ‘Pouf!’ he exclaimed. ‘What a fug!’ And elevated his nose with a sniff. 1923 U. L. SILBERRAD Lett. J. Armiter x. 214 Can you smell the cold damp fug of those wet Sunday afternoons..? 1925 Chambers’s Jrnl. 556/1 The ‘fug’ that could be got up inside these huts was sheer bliss to many a trench-weary soldier during the war. 1927 W. DEEPING Kitty xvii, It [sc. a sickroom] smelt like a greenhouse, full of soft fug. 1940 M. MARPLES Pub. Sch. Slang 85 Fug-footer (Harrow, 1884 +), indoor football. 1948 G. H. JOHNSTON Death takes Small Bites i. 29 The fug of the room. 1968 J. E. MATTHEWS Brew’s Youth & Youth Groups (ed. 2) x. 149 There are only three necessities{em}light,..warmth, and if we cater for boys this often means a ‘fug’{em}and comradeship.
