921. Taxes, and the words for them, go back all the way to ancient Egypt. Plus, I have much more to tell you about the phrase "I am sufficiently suffoncified"! It's an especially fun week on the Grammar Girl podcast.
921. Taxes, and the words for them, go back all the way to ancient Egypt. Plus, I have much more to tell you about the phrase "I am sufficiently suffoncified"! It's an especially fun week on the Grammar Girl podcast.
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Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty and you can think of me as your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. This week, I have a bunch of listener comments on different topics, and then we’ll talk about words related to taxes and some surprising findings about last week’s sufficiently suffonsified familect story.
Last week, I talked about how back in Middle English the pronouns “mine” and “thine” led people to also end their other pronouns with N-sounds, giving us “hisn,” “hern,” “ourn,” “yourn” and so on.
Well, a follower who goes by errg on Mastodon (e-r-r-g) told me about a more recent use. Daniel Drew was a New York stock speculator in the mid-1800s, and he’s famous for this saying about the nature of short selling: "He who sells what isn't his'n, must buy it back or go to pris'n."
And it seems like rhyming is where it still finds the occasional use even in modern times because a listener who goes by RadiDaddy on Mastodon pointed me to a Nick Lowe song from the 1970s called “So It Goes,” with the line “On his arm was a skin-tight vision, wonder why she ain’t mine, she is his’n.”
Fun stuff. You can hear a clip of it on YouTube.
And then RadiDaddy also has an interesting comment about the loneliness segment. He wrote, “I suspect Tolkien, a linguist, was very aware of the older meaning of “loneliness” when he called Erebor “The Lonely Mountain” in “The Hobbit.” Could be. It wouldn’t surprise me. And thanks for the interesting comments.
By Valerie Fridland
Very few people outside of those who work for the IRS take much pleasure in taxes, but while paying your taxes might make April feel gloomy, digging deep into the origins of tax terms provides a bit of linguistic levity during these dark days of tax season.
The idea of taxation – or the collection of a fee by the government based on one’s property and wealth – has been around for at least 5,000 years, levied early on by Egyptian pharaohs who realized that collecting a portion of grain and cooking oil from their populace made for nicer royal digs and bigger well-fed armies. In fact, the famed Rosetta Stone, the inscribed stone that helped crack the code of ancient hieroglyphics, tells us a lot about taxes. It has writing about Egyptian ruler Ptolemy V’s new tax code, particularly the tax-exempt status of temples. A bit less romantic of an inscription than what you might envision when admiring the stone at the British Museum.
Despite the fact that paying some sort of tax to your government has been around a long time, the word "tax" itself is a bit more recent. The verb form, "to tax," came into English around the 14th century, through the Old French word "taxer," meaning to estimate or assess (an amount). There was also a noun form, "taxe," which meant pretty much the same thing it does today — a payment you're required by law to make to a governmental authority. All of these forms came to French from the Latin word "taxare" which meant "to assess or estimate." In turn, the Latin word is hypothesized to have come from a Proto-Indo European root "*tag-" meaning “to touch or handle," and which also gave us the modern English words "tangible" and "tactile." At first glance, it may seem that assessing and touching don’t have that much in common (at least nothing legal), but the Latin word seems to have also referred to handling money, which makes the early relation between this pair of words make a bit more sense.
Since French speaking Anglo-Normans were the powers that be for centuries in Britain after the Norman invasion in 1066, the introduction of this word into English was likely not a disinterested one. And this wasn't the only word used to refer to the obligations Middle English people faced: for much of this period, the word "tasque," aka, our modern "task," was used somewhat interchangeably with the word "tax." In fact, "task" is from the same Latin root as "tax," only with the “k”+ “s” sounds transposed. This is the same process that gave us the modern alternation between the word "ask" and its less well-regarded sibling "aks." As with "tax," the “ks” order in "ask" is the original, and the “sk” order came about through a sound-switching process linguists call metathesis. The thing driving "task" and "tax"’s wider acceptance was that they developed different meanings over time, with "tax" becoming associated with monetary obligation and "task" becoming associated with labor and to do lists. In contrast, "aks" and "ask" stayed in competition, carrying the same meaning, mainly as dialectal variants. Eventually "ask" became the more dominant standard form, and "aks" became stigmatized.
As will come as no surprise to anyone who has experienced paying it, the word "tax" began to take on a negative association as something demanding or wearisome, a meaning employed in modern uses such as “Deciphering new tax rules is so taxing.” To try to help avoid tarnishing the reputation of taking people’s money, the word "duty," which in the 13th century had a bit more of a positive spin as something honorable, was put into play to try to make taxation fun again, but to no avail. Soon "duty" became just one more word alongside "tax" on the list of what to avoid talking about on first dates or when serving as an elected official. Still, the enticement of getting something duty-free does remain a boon for airport travelers on international layovers.
So, although a trip through the linguistic history of taxation may not help you avoid an audit, it might at least make you a little more appreciative of the practice by putting it in historical perspective. Taxes, by any name, have long been a fact of life, which is why the expression “death and taxes” has also been heard echoing in English for centuries.
That segment was written by Valerie Fridland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and the author of the forthcoming book "Like Literally, Dude" on all the speech habits we love to hate. You can find her at valeriefridland.com.
By Mignon Fogarty
Next, I have much more to tell you about last week’s familect story, in which Chris Bacon talked about a grandmother who said “my sufficiency has been suffonsified.” My old podcasting friend Chris Christiensen of the Amateur Traveler podcast heard the show and wrote in to say his mother and grandmother would say something very similar. He very generously did a bunch of searching and sent me some links. For example, there’s a long 2005 thread on the alt.useage.english Google Group of people telling stories of the different variations of the phrase in their families and linking to other useful sources. And it turns out this expression goes back to at least the mid-1800s.
Further, a listener who goes by @PMB on Mastodon pointed me to an old 2010 episode of the radio program “A Way with Words” that answered a caller question about the phrase “I am sufficiently suffonsified.” They found a 1980 article in the Journal American Speech about the phrase in which Frederic G. Cassidy wrote about trying to track down this phase. Cassidy was the editor of the Dictionary of American Regional English, and he said that in response to a question from an elderly woman in West Virginia, he posed a question about the phrase in a widely distributed publication and got more than 46 responses — mostly from people who remembered an older relative using it — and every one was slightly different. And there was a common second part to the phrase! It generally went like this: "My sufficiency is fully suffonsified; any more would be obnoxious to my fastidious taste." So there’s a refusal, and then an explanation of the refusal.
And I love this quotation from Cassidy’s paper. He wrote, “Surancified, … is clearly intended to be impressive and a bit mysterious. Our evidence suggests that the original formula was elaborated until it became too hard to learn and produced embarrassing breakdowns and finally that it became fashionable—as a sort of game—to invent new, amusing elaborations.” He got letters and postcards from people from many countries, and he listed 17 different spellings.
Some examples of the variations include "I have eaten to my sanctification," "My sufficiency is greatly suffonsified,” "My sufficiency is prodigiously suffonsified,” "My sufficiency is completely suffonsified.”
Or they might say the first part a bit differently: “My ample sufficiency is fully suffonsified.” or “My genteel sufficiency is fully suffonsified.”
Chris Christianson reported that his famliy said “My sufficiency has been sereneified, anything else would be obnoxious to my super fluency.”
A Google Book search turned up a biography of Patrick Kerwin, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada in 1954, that revealed that he would push back his chair and say he was “sufficiently suffonsified” at the end of a meal. This Canadian connection is especially tantalizing because a 2002 post on Michael Qunion’s wonderful World Wide Words website suggested that although the phrase is found all over English-speaking countries, it seemed to be best known in Canada based on what he’d seen online and from correspondence he’d received about the phrase. And as a fun aside, he mentions that it appears in the Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s novel “Cat’s Eye.”
In fact, my Google Book search turned up the phrase in quite a few present day novels. Plus, Chris Christiansen even sent me a link to a 2007 song on Band Camp called “Sufficiently Serensified” by the Spokane band 3H. In fact, it actually seems so widespread that at this point, I’m surprised it’s not in the Oxford English Dictionary; although, I did find a single 2011 entry for it in the Urban Dictionary. But after all that, I didn’t come across anything that convinced me of the actual origin of the phrase. I think that still remains a mystery.
And thanks to everyone who helped me add to this fun, fascinating story. I love the surprise when what seems to be a familect turns out to be something more.
Finally, I have another familect story:
"Hello, Grammar Girl. I'm not sure that this qualifies as a familect, but anytime we take long rides when the kids were small, we had the question always asked, ‘How far are we?’ and I always just said, ‘Twenty minutes.’ So no matter where we are today even as the kids are now young adults. I'll ask where they are, and they’ll say, ‘We're 20 minutes from home, or 20 minutes from there,’ No matter how far they are away. Thank you."
That’s kind of funny, although it also feels like a very unhelpful answer now that you’re all adults. I find myself wondering how you plan. But it reminded me of visiting my friend from high school who had moved to Los Angeles. She described everywhere we wanted to go about “about an hour” away. The beach? About an hour? The restaurant? About an hour. And so on. To this day, I’m convinced everything in LA is about an hour away from everywhere else. I suspect it has to do with the traffic, and if it looks like it’s going to be more than an hour, you just go somewhere else.
Thanks for the call.
If you want to share the story of your familect, a family dialect or a word your family and only your family uses, call the voicemail line at 83-321-4-GIRL. Call from a nice quiet place, and we might play it on the show.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to our audio engineer Nathan Semes, and our director of podcasts (and my editor), Adam Cecil, who is enjoying his newly opened local branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. Our marketing associate is Davina Tomlin, and our digital operations specialist is Holly Hutchings. Our ad operations specialist is Morgan Christianson, and our intern is Kamryn Lacy.
And I’m Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl. That's all. Thanks for listening.