Word of the Day: scapegrace

scapegrace (n)

A mischief maker, a scoundrel.

"Alaeddin continued in his former ill courses and, when his mother saw that her spouse had deceased, and that her son was a scapegrace and good for nothing at all, she sold the shop and whatso was to found therein and fell to spinning cotton yarn."
--Sir Richard Burton, The Arabian Nights

When I was a kid, my sister had a doll, a huge and life-like baby doll, which we christened "Big Bertha". She resembled a two-year-old child, especially at a distance. In one of my infrequent but not insignificant episodes as a scapegrace, I decided to place Bertha outside in a sitting position right next to the fairly busy road that passed our house. Scores of cars slowed down as the drivers thought they needed to avoid hitting a child -- and perhaps thinking they should stop and help a poor little waif who was about to wander into traffic. They sped off as soon as they realized they'd been fooled by a simulacrum. A school bus passed by, but some of the scapegraces inside were not fooled by Big Bertha -- one of them spit on her from an open window.

My siblings thought all this was hilarious, and even my mother tittered a bit before she made me bring Bertha back inside, so she wouldn't "cause an accident". To this day, decades later, the kinfolk still mention this incident whenever we get together. Meanwhile, Big Bertha, who we thought we'd stored away in a closet or the basement of my mother's house, is nowhere to be found. I like to imagine that she escaped one day and hitched a ride to somewhere she feels safe and better appreciated.