Do people really say “spiffing”?

Posted on by

A. tells me she wants to be a character in my blog. I didn’t think I had characters in my blog, just people I hide behind initials, but I like to make people happy when I can. So here’s a scene, complete with characters.

I was at the pub recently on singers night, and during the break A. and C. and I were standing around talking. As nearly as I can reconstruct the conversation, C. asked A. (apropos of I have no idea what; possibly nothing), “Are you spiffing?”

A. looked, I think, surprised but said yes, she was spiffing.

Irrelevant photo: Find the walker. Find the beach, for that matter.

Irrelevant photo: Find the walker. Find the beach, for that matter. I love fog, which is lucky since we get a lot of it.

An interruption here: Since I’m turning people into characters, I can abandon my limited point of view and say that A. didn’t just look surprised, she was surprised. She was also amused and ready to go along with a joke.

C. turned to me and asked if I was also spiffing.

And here we get another interruption (what would this blog be without interruptions?), because we’ve got to consider the word spiffing. It made me think I’d fallen into a 1920s English novel. I can’t remember hearing anyone say the word before, ever, so when I started to write this scene I pulled out the small collection of dictionaries that made it across the Atlantic with me or that I’ve bought since I moved here. (Before I retired, I worked as an editor, so it made sense to have more than one dictionary. I miss the ones I left behind.)

My American dictionary doesn’t include any variation on spiffing, and I was ready to declare the word a Britishism, but then I tried my two British dictionaries and they didn’t have it either. None of them are particularly good dictionaries, mind you, but still, that says something about the word, doesn’t it? The only places I found it were: 1, In NTC’s Dictionary of British Slang, which gave me spiffed out (dressed up; polished up nicely), spiffing (excellent), and spiffy (clean and tidy; excellent), but it didn’t say anything about their origin. And 2, in British English A to Zed (what could be more British than a zed?), which gave me spif(f)licate (to knock the hell out of; to destroy). I took that for a word origin, although I still don’t see how you get from there to excellent etc.

Then I went online. The Online Etymology Dictionary says: “1853, of uncertain origin, probably related to spiff ‘well-dressed man.’ Uncertain relationship to spiff (n.) ‘percentage allowed by drapers to their young men when they effect sale of old fashioned or undesirable stock’ (1859), or to spiflicate ‘confound, overcome completely,’ a cant word from 1749 that was ‘common in the 19th century’ [OED], preserved in American English and yielded slang spiflicated ‘drunk,’ first recorded in that sense 1902.”

Preserved in American English? Excuse me, but the only time we’d use the word in the U.S. (and again, remember, I’m omniscient for the duration of this post) is when we want to sound faintly ridiculous. And even then, we’d only use it in one sentence, which we could only say in one of three contexts. It goes as follows: “We’ve got to spiff this place up before

  1. your parents
  2. the landlord, or
  3. the police

get here.”

Or, okay, I’ll contradict myself: We might say something was pretty spiffy. But again, only if we wanted that slight tang of absurdity.

Spiffing, though? Never.

As a point of information, when an online search engine offered to translate spiffy into any of the world’s many languages, I couldn’t resist taking it up on the offer. I chose Spanish first and then French, because I actually speak those.

Almost. To be completely honest, I only speak French if you have some imagination and a flexible definition of the word speak, and even if my Spanish is workable it’s a long way from perfect, but for the purposes of one word that should be close enough. I’d stand a fighting chance of comparing the translation to reality. Or at least to a dictionary.

The search engine translated spiffy as spiffy. In both languages.

Thank you, oh great googlemaster. That was tremendously helpful, but it slowed our scene down, so let’s go back to our conversation. You remember our conversation? A. and C. and me in the pub on singers night?

C. turned to me and asked if I was spiffing. My mind went into that overdrive thing minds sometimes do when they’re asked a question they can’t process. The word spiffing, it said to itself, and to me since I was eavesdropping helplessly, cannot exist outside of 1920s fiction set among aristocratic twits who lounge around holding tennis rackets and drinking martinis. It can therefore only be used by or about people who are English, aristocratic twits, and born around 1900. You are none of these things, therefore you cannot be spiffing.

My mind didn’t stop to notice that C. isn’t any of those things and that A. is only one of them, English, but minds are like that under pressure. Or mine is. It focuses very narrowly and is very, very strange.

Without consulting me (and since we’ve wandered again, I’ll remind you that the question was “Are you spiffing?”), my mouth said, “No, I’m American.”

Which was as true as it was irrelevant.

That pretty well took care of the break. We’d eaten our sandwiches and had our conversation and those of us who’d taken cheese sandwiches had spread the grated cheese that hadn’t made it to our mouths in a nice even pattern on the carpet. That happens every week. We spif(f)licate [knock hell out of] the sandwiches and the next week (or presumably, day) the carpet’s clean again. I have no idea how they get it up. Or why they think carpet’s a good idea.

They could, in theory, slice the cheese instead of grating it, but it would be un-British.

40 thoughts on “Do people really say “spiffing”?”

  4. Nice story. I was familiar with spiffy but not spiffing. Spifficate sounds like a word I would make up in a hurry, like cleanify or cleanificated. Thanks for pointing me to the OED. I guess that should be “the other OED” but, you know. Of course, this whole conversation makes me think of Spaceman Spiff, Calvin’s alter ego in Calvin and Hobbs, which I truly miss.

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply ↓

  6. Hi Ellen,
    I’d never have thought my (American) wife was slightly absurd when she said I was looking spiffy. ;) Now you hurt my ego very much. ;)
    Have a wonderful day,
    Pit

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply ↓

  8. Brit vs. USA English sometimes turns up good ones, I hover from one to the other and do find spiffy/spiffing vaguely absurd. But Ellen, on quite another subject, aren’t you going to regale us with tales of local reactions to your adopted country opting out of History – or into it, depending on your point of view ?

    Like

    Reply ↓

  9. You gave me quite a smile – never heard the term – still not entirely sure what it means – But I think you spiffed this post!! I enjoyed reading it!

    Stopped over from the mostly blogging meet and greet!

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply ↓

  10. You need some more dictionaries Notes. Sounds like something out of C.K.Chesterton yet I couldn’t find a reference and I know I’ve seen it (but agree not heard except in “spiff this place up”) so here goes:
    Collins English Dictionary
    adjective
    British slang, old-fashioned excellent; splendid

    Oxford Dictionaries (Can’t consult my own 35 year old volumes cuz I only use them to keep the French doors closed in my 80 year old home)
    British informal, dated
    Excellent; splendid:
    it’s a frightfully spiffing idea

    Where I think the word came from (Also From Oxford Dictionaries:
    Spiffy
    adjective
    smart in appearance:
    synonyms: fashionable, well dressed, elegant, trendy, stylish, chic
    And my only personal use: Spificated and/or Spiffed; used the the movie Harvey by Henry Fonda. I believe the origins are unknown. ~~dru~~

    ps: didn’t read all the comments so you’ve probably been told all the already…me

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply ↓

  11. I used to have an aunt (passed on now) who would use words like spiffing. She wasn’t born until the late 1920s but my grandmother was born in 1900 so she probably was just mimicking her mom, although I never heard my grandmother use the word. My aunt was always trying to be noticed. She was an attention monger. What better was to get noticed than to use language no one else did, right? When she used it, she was always referring to cleaning or how a person looked. Is there any other meanings for this old fashion slang?

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply ↓

    • I haven’t heard it used enough to trust my ear, so I hesitate to answer. However–what the hell, why not give it a try? A lot of people have commented that the word seems to leap out of the Jeeves and Wooster stories, and I can imagine Bertie Wooster saying something was positively spiffing–a day, a drink, a person, an anything. But to my ear, it sounds absurdly affected when used that way. Which in the Jeeves and Wooster stories, I suppose, would be the point.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply ↓

  13. Perhaps spiff was the progenitor of today’s spiv, (well, maybe not exactly today, but somewhere in the last hundred years) and people stop saying spiffing because they didn’t want to be connected with spivs?

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply ↓

    • I was sure you were going down a dead-end street with that, but I checked Etymology Online (https://www.etymonline.com/word/spiv) and damned if you’re not right. The connection is that a spiv (a petty crook, from roughly the 1930s) was likely to be a flashy dresser (from the 1840s). I’m not sure that’s why spiffy dropped out of use. Slang changes. Words drop out of fashion and begin to sound ridiculous, often just because they belong to an older generation.

      Like

      Reply ↓

Talk to me

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.