My spouse and I were having a brief conversation yesterday about a letter we received (enclosed in a Christmas card). The letter-in-a-card came from a former neighbor of ours, who inserted the letter to mark the occasion of his decision to discontinue their practice of sending annual Christmas greetings in a card. He made the obligatory comment about donating any savings to the charity of his choice. Big deal, I guess. We really haven't sent Christmas cards to speak of in many years. This couple has been an exception. As we have for the past ten years, we had mailed them a card last Friday. We have always felt sort of obligated to send one to them since they began sending one to us each year after they moved away. My wife passed me the letter without comment to see how I might react. I didn't. She couldn't stand it, so she asked me what I thought. I observed that when they lived across the street, we didn't exchange cards, but did have them over for a Christmas drink now and then. We nattered back and forth about who used to write the cards and who had written this one, and moved on to other things.
A short time later, she returned and said the tone of the letter was sort of curmudgeony to her. I immediately pointed out that "curmudgeony" was not a word at all. Someone has to police word use around here.
She gave me the usual roll of the eyeballs and waited for a response that was more on point. I pointed out that in this season, she might ought to have said his tone was Scroogeish. She did not even rise to the bait, but instead chose to weigh my response to see if she might locate some actual meaningful acknowledgement of her point. Nodding her head, she noted that the Scrooge reference seemed more apt, in light of the fact that he had made it a point to note he would be donating any savings "to the charity of his choice."
It seemed to me he had borrowed that phrase from somewhere, in light of the simple fact that he should already know which charity is the charity of his choice, wouldn't you think? My wife believes he is euphemistically saying he will keep the savings for himself (that being his favorite charity). I don't care. We did wonder about whether it was the spirit of Scrooge or our former neighbor's turning into a curmudgeon that had brought this on. His wife usually sent the cards, and it was probably just a coincidence that the first year he seemed to have been given the assignment of sending the cards would also be their last. I found myself wishing we knew her birthday, so we could start sending her a birthday card just for the fun of it.
But I really wanted to talk about words and their evolution. In some small way, we felt as if we had contributed to creating a word a few years back when my wife observed while we were driving somewhere (and now seemed likely to be late) that she really hadn't expected it to be so trafficky at that hour. The friends who were staying with us agreed with me during the ride that "trafficky" was not a word at all.
However, not wanting to be seen as siding with me completely, one of the passengers (yes, it was the girl passenger) later took the position that it should be and proceeded to use it at every opportunity during her stay. I felt like I had to just take a look when Merriam-Webster published its list of new words the next year (you know, the ones that had come into use so regularly that they were being added to the dictionary). We're still looking. "Trafficky" has not made the list.
Now, the competition is between "curmudgeony" and "scroogeish" (yes, the upper case letter is optional). If the vote takes place in the last two weeks of the year, I think I have a better chance.
P.S., Being fair-minded, I just added both "curmudgeony" and "scroogeish" to my internal dictionary in Word. I still won't add "trafficky." You have to draw a line somewhere.
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