Each week The Sun's John McIntyre presents a relatively obscure but evocative word with which you may not be familiar, another brick to add to the wall of your vocabulary. This week's word:
FUTZ
Yiddish has been kind enough to offer a generous helping of pungent terms to English, and English has been smart enough to adopt and naturalize them. Among them, futz, usually occurring with around, cropped up in American English circa 1930.
The etymology is conjectural, most likely from the Yiddish arumfartsn zikh, "to fart around."
Thus it usually means "to fool around," "to loaf," "to waste time." In my house, it typically means (without violating marital privilege) "to eat up time with minor tasks or activities performed without urgency."
Example: From Nathaniel Benchley's Welcome to Xanadu (1968): "It's bad for your blood pressure to futz around like this."