Pylimitics

A couple of centuries ago if you hosted someone for dinner, you might, just as today, ask if they’d had enough to eat. Rather than the efficient but oafish “yup” we would use, your guest might eloquently reply “I’ve had an elegant sufficiency, thank you.”

That phrase was in use pretty widely; there are examples from Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Australia, England, and the US. It might have originated with a poem. Y’know, people used to not only read poems, but memorize and quote them, and this one was very popular in the 1700s and 1800s:

“An elegant sufficiency, content,
Retirement, rural quiet, friendship, books.
Ease and alternate labor, useful life,
Progressive virtue, and approving Heaven;
These are the matchless joys of virtuous love.”

The poem is Spring by James Thomson, and it probably entered the language to the extent that the phrase “elegant sufficiency” — or at least a variation of it — is still in use in some places, including Canada. The variation includes a word clearly added by an able logodaedalus: “suffonsified.” In its modern form people seem to say “my sufficiency is suffonsified.” The phrase has become more casual over the centuries (we should be glad we no longer need to cope with 18th-Century apparel either!) so “suffonsified” can also be found as “suffancified” and “suffulsified”. 

“Suffonsified” appears in a modern novel: Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood, and there is (or was) a restaurant reviewer in Vancouver with the pen name “Sufficiently Suffonsified.” There’s even a recording by an Austrian band (Cunning Dorx, a fairly informal appellation) titled Paradigms Suffonsified.

“Suffonsified” comes from an age when coining new polysyllabic words was at least as popular as poetry. In that sense it’s a bit of a fossil that, like the coelocanth, turns out not to be extinct after all. It joins “absquatulate” (run away), “hornswoggle” (defrauded or confused), and “sockdolager” (an exceptional thing, especially a fish of unexpected size). These are all still in use, although some of them are pretty obscure. But they’ve at least outlasted some other constructions from that age, including “blustrification” (celebrating loudly), “goshbustified” (very pleased), and “dumfungled” (all used up, which is what my list of super obscure obsolete words for today now is).