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Wednesday August 26, 2009

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scion [SY-uhn]

noun

1. A descendant; an heir.
2. A shoot or sprout of a plant or a piece of a slender branch or twig cut for grafting.

• The incident was the pre-dawn drive the congressman took straight into a security barrier outside of the Capitol on May 4, 2006. At about 2:45 a.m., the bleary-eyed scion of America's royal family staggered out of his green 1997 Ford Mustang convertible and informed police he was late for a vote.
  Vincent Bzdek, "Personal Low to Career Peak", The Washington Post, Apr 28, 2009
• They drive fast in Mole's brother's car, anywhere they can go, and one day they are hit by the local scion, the cream cheese prince, Benny Patterson.
  Susan Salter Reynolds, "BOOK REVIEW: SPRING BOOKS; Night terrors amid the American Dream", Los Angeles Times, Apr 26, 2009
• Brought up in a bountiful country, where no one really has to work very hard to live, nurtured on adventure, scion of a free and merry stock, the real, native Californian is a distinctive type; as far from the Easterner in psychology as the extreme Southerner is from the Yankee.
  Will Irwin (1873-1948) An American author, writer and journalist. The City That Was - A Requiem of Old San Francisco (1906)

Origin of the Word

Scion, approximately 1305, derives from Old French sion, cion perhaps from Germanic origin 'chInan': to sprout.