Suffonsified

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name’s Elizabeth Bushman, and I’m calling from the thriving metropolis of Princeton, Texas.

Well, hello, Elizabeth. Welcome to the program. It’s thriving. What goes on in Princeton?

Not much. It’s pretty small, actually.

They’re too busy thriving.

Exactly.

Well, if you’ve got a stoplight in a drugstore, then it’s a town, right?

Well, exactly. And we even have a McDonald’s, so we’re doing pretty good.

Okay. Gas station?

Well, if you grew up in towns like that in Missouri, I’m completely with you here.

Right. Well, I have a question, and I’m hoping that you guys can give me some insight.

My father grew up in Snowflake, Arizona, and he was the youngest of eight children.

He’s been gone now for about 20 years, but we still keep him very much alive in our sayings.

And one of the things that his family used to do at the end of a meal when asked if they would want more food, they would say, I am sufficiently safonsified.

Anything more would be purely obnoxious to my taste.

No, thank you.

Now, he swore up and down that safonsified was a word, but we’ve researched it.

I’ve talked to many reference librarians, consulted many dictionaries, and we haven’t been able to find the word, and I was hoping you could help me track it down.

Safonsified. Can you say that line again, please?

Well, he would say, I am sufficiently safonsified.

Anything more would be purely obnoxious to my taste.

No, thank you.

I love that.

And that’s a no, right?

All that means no.

Exactly.

And so did he have a particular look about him?

Did it look like he was, did he like change his attitude or his, recompose his face when he said this?

I mean, was it just the words or was there something else going along with it?

Well, you know, a little patting of the tummy and a smug look like he knew something that we didn’t.

That sounds like my co-host.

What?

I’ve heard that about him.

Wait, it’s like only in Princeton, Texas they’ve been talking about me?

That’s right.

That’s right.

Michael, that’s right.

He is sufficiently suphansified.

I am sufficiently suphansified.

I love this expression.

Elizabeth, yes, we can help you with this.

We can.

And the part that I love about it the most is obnoxious to my taste.

What a construction that is.

Yeah, this has been a popular expression in some circles for a while, especially I read in Canada.

And you spell the word S-U-F-F-O-N-S-I-F-I-E-D, sephansified.

That’s the way you usually see it.

I’ve seen sephansified and sephalsified.

Well, and I think it’s interesting.

My grandmother, I figured this came through my grandfather’s smart aleckness, but my grandmother was from Canada.

So I wonder if that’s…

Okay.

Okay, yeah.

Yeah, there’s a couple places where this has been looked into with a little bit of satisfaction.

I think they’ve done a fairly decent job of it.

But it turns out that a lot of variations of this whole expression you’ve given have existed since at least the mid-1800s.

And you know what we’re going to do, Elizabeth?

We’re going to link to some articles about this.

We’ll put them on our website so that we can just share more information about it because the extended forms of this, some of them are very convoluted, and some of the passages from the books are really striking in the way that the character kind of makes a fool of himself accidentally.

It’s just fun stuff.

Very good. Well, thank you so much.

This has been very enjoyable, and I appreciate your information.

I think you’re saying that your linguistic sufficiency has been suffonsified.

I have been suffonsified.

And we are not obnoxious to your taste, I hope.

Definitely not.

Thank you, Elizabeth.

You bet. Thank you. Bye now.

Bye-bye.

Well, if you’ve got something like this that you’d like to talk about, just a little bit of goofing around is perfectly allowed.

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