Near-real-time help...

[alexpgp]

After having finished two shorter documents on a certain aspect of property ownership in the old USSR, I pressed on to get some kind of mileage behind me in translating a third, larger document for the same client due early next week.

I see, by what is displayed on my screen, that my most recent lookup—about ten minutes ago—was право пользования, which I performed to make sure there wasn't anything better than "right of usage." I saw "right of enjoyment" but in the end, decided against its use.

So there I am, minding my own business, when about five minutes later, I felt an urge to pronounce the word "usufruct," just to hear it echo around the room. So I did, startling the cat that was yawning on the chair next to my desk.

I knew it was a fair-dinkum word, but had absolutely no idea what it meant.

A few keystrokes later, I found out:

u·su·fruct

Noun:

The right to enjoy the use and advantages of another's property short of the destruction or waste of its substance.

Hmmm. A word related to the usage of property. How about that?

Okay, so it's not as if my subconscious just spit out the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything (the answer to which, as we all know, is 42), but coming up with "usufruct" when I'm fresh from thinking about "enjoying the use of property" is not exactly a case of "Maggie's drawers¹," either.

And I'm pretty impressed—I think—by just how forcefully the word came into my consciousness, too.

Now if my subconscious would only correctly pick the next Powerball numbers, that'd really be impressive!

Cheers...

¹A red flag waved from the rifle pits to indicate a complete miss of the target during Marine Corps rifle qualification.

Comments

[furzicle.livejournal.com]

I am well familiar with the term usufruct. My husband's 99 year old aunt was living in her house for many years after her husband died. He had willed the house to his cousin and specified that his widowed wife would stay in it. He was a poster child for the term "Good ol' boy.' (This was in Mandeville, across the lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans.) I don't know what his reasoning on the usufruct thing was. But it was a good lesson. The aunt died at 99 years and 3 months or so.