Nifty, swell & spiffy
Last week’s words were all created or
transmogrified by jazz musicians. This week’s words all have questionable
parentage. Still, jazz musicians have been known to get around. Might they hold
some responsibility for nifty, swell & spiffy?
Swell in its noun form came into English in the 1200s. Though it appears to
have Germanic roots, no direct line can be found. Swell’s origin is a
mystery. Initially, swell meant a morbid
swelling, & showed up just in time to get lots of use during the Black
Death. By the 1600s, swell also referred to a rise in the sea, and by the 1780s it
picked up the meaning, an elegant,
wealthy person, due to perceived “puffed up, pompous behavior” of the
elegant & wealthy. A brief fifty years later the noun slid sideways into
the world of adjectives & began to simply mean fashionably dressed. In the late 1700s, that “puffed up” flavor of
swell began applying itself to words, and came to mean an inflated style of language. By the
time the century turned, swell shifted again to mean good or excellent. In 1930s America it
took another sideways slide into the world of interjections, becoming understandable
all by itself in a sentence as a “stand alone expression of satisfaction.”
Nifty made its way into English in 1868, with two posited, yet questionable
origins. Some etymologists believe nifty came from the theater crowd,
but have little evidence to support this. Most etymologists also doubt the
origin story offered by Bret Harte when asked about nifty’s appearance in his
writing. He claimed nifty was an abbreviation
of magnificat. Still, nobody knows.
In 1853 spiffy appeared in
English, also with no known origin, though it appeared about the same time as
another word with no apparent source, spiff, a well-dressed gentleman. By the 1870s, the term spiffing
became popular, meaning excellent. To
confuse matters, there’s no apparent relationship to the noun spiff,
a term used in the draper’s trade, meaning the
percentage owed a salesman who sells outdated or undesirable stock. The same
is said of the verb to spiflicate, which means
to confound, & may just be a word we need to bring back to popular
usage.
Followers, please leave a comment. In
this modern age are we suffering from the confusion that anything swelled
up is a good thing? On another note, might spiffy, swell
&
nifty have been born in the world of jazz? More importantly, are
spiffy, swell & nifty still alive & thriving, or do they only spiflicate
modern English listeners?