A "shufti" is apparently a look at something, or a look around, as in "let's have a quick shufti at the specs" (from the Register, which uses the term regularly).
Michael Quinion's excellent World Wide Words site gives the etymology of "shufti"; it comes from the Arabic, and apparently entered wide English use among the RAF in the 1920s.
Just wanted to say that I read Neology daily. Love words.
It’s interesting how words cross from one language to another when two cultures come in contact. Sometimes this contact is in the form of war, but even so, words from the enemies enter each other’s language. ‘Shufti’ seems to have entered British English at the time of T.E. Lawrence and the Arab Revolt.
Near the end of The Mote in God’s Eye there’s a scene of soldiers playing craps and using Motie words. The wacky language of A Clockwork Orange — the novel, not the film — is derived from the idea that the Cold War would drive Russian vocabulary into English. Actually, the opposite probably happened to a much greater degree. And I just learned that the word ‘honcho’, which I associate with the American West, for some reason, is actually Japanese, and probably came into the language during WWII.