'Every Word Is a World'

When someone had eaten his fill and couldn’t take another bite, my maternal grandmother, born the same year as T.S. Eliot, would say, “His sufficiency is suffonsified.” I’ve never heard another person utter those words. For most of my life I assumed the fourth word in that sentence was her invention, intended as a parody of high-falutin’ language. There’s an old American tradition of deflating pretentiousness with word choice (see Twain, Mencken). 

Now I learn that suffonsified, though not found in the OED or recognized by my spell-check software, is used in Canada in the sense my grandmother intended. It means “satisfied.” Born in upstate New York and a lifelong resident of the U.S., she was not Canadian. I have no idea where she acquired the word and its hint of faux gentility. She was not well-educated in any formal sense but was kind and gently humorous, not a tyrant, rare qualities in my family.

 

Conversation is one of life’s great pleasures, an opportunity to use words colorfully and with precision, with fewer of the constraints imposed on written language. I fear we’re becoming linguistically dull. The American vocabulary is shrinking to a utilitarian list of  several hundred words, including obscenities and cryptic pop-culture references. People seem embarrassed to express themselves interestingly, with vivid language. This is reflected in our journalism and belles-lettres (if we can still use that term). In an interview, the American poet A.E. Stallings worries about what she calls “loss of verbodiversity”:

 

“You see this in workshops, too, where a word or expression that stands out as odd or idiosyncratic is singled out for censure and then self-censored. I want to do the opposite of self-censoring, and the opposite of censorship is permission. Yes, I am deliberately going to use the word ‘drouth,’ archaic and old fashioned though it be. And ‘shitty.’ And ‘hypoxic.’ And ‘scooch.’”

 

I often use “shitty” and “scooch,” but never "drouth” with that spelling. It’s a word Charles Montagu Doughty probably used in Arabia Deserta. It seems my vocabulary has grown hypoxic. What a pleasure it is to hear Stallings speak:

 

“I sometimes get a little shock when I see or hear a word, a perfectly useful regular kind of word (say Biden’s ‘malarkey,’ which I like), that I haven’t in a while. Is it headed for a kind of extinction? Do I need to make use of it so it stays in the word hoard? Is my own vocabulary flattening? (The great danger of AI to literature—besides its just being terrible for the health of the planet at large—is not that it is going to replace writers, but that humans are going to start to sound like AI.) It isn’t as urgent as the need to preserve biodiversity, but in a way, they aren’t entirely unrelated. As Linnaeus said, ‘If the names are unknown, knowledge of the things also perishes.’ That’s true of nature words, names of flowers and phenomena. But it’s true of other things, too. Every word is a world.”