PIFFLE
E. B. White wanted to resurrect the word "piffle."
In One Man’s Meat, E. B. White
wrote the single line: “Remind me to discuss the necessity
for reviving the word piffle.”
I’ve found no further reference to the word in his writing.
Perhaps we failed to remind him.
Because his words were always carefully chosen, we can
trust that his request has much meaning. He wanted to
discuss, not command. A distinct event must have
triggered his thought, because a necessity is
created when something has happened, not merely when
someone ruminates. I suspect he wrote that line after he
had endured so much piffle – among his acquaintances? in
journalism? among politicians? – that he felt he must speak
out.
Reviving a word suggests that it has no equal in
our common discourse today. Why? Often a word goes out of
use when it is presumed to offend. We no longer refer to a
man as a scoundrel or describe a child as crippled. Bombast
is now labeled debate-leading-to-compromise. It’s now
kinder to describe a liar as someone who is a little
economical with the truth. Truth, which offends both as a
word and by its very existence, has been sanitized and is
now admitted into discourse only so long as it is
understood to be subjective.
Walker’s Dictionary of 1821, which sits on my own
book shelf, doesn’t include the word. But a 1936 collegiate
dictionary at my disposal, suitably innocent of the
corruption of our speech by the modern indignation over our
insensitive language – (too many precise words like piffle
in the dictionary, too few useless but shockingly profane
words, both errors in our lexicon corrected since the
1960s) – defines piffle as: trifling talk or action; stuff
and nonsense; noun or intransitive verb.
Gossip, then? Sensational reporting and celebrity-worship?
Political speech and correctness? What annoyed E. B. White
that he would revive the word, no doubt in order to use it?
Among my treasures I have “a card,” apparently one of a mass
mailing sent in 1864, not handwritten but printed at
my ancestors’ local print shop in Farmington, Maine.
For printing in their newspaper “false and libelous
statements and innuendoes” about him, the author
succinctly, scathingly denounces, to one and all
receiving the card, that the editors of the
Farmington Chronicle are slanderers and
liars. There, he said it. I’ll never know whether the
accused fought back, through the mail or in the
courts. But the scoundrels sufficiently annoyed the
card-writer to occasion an eloquent outburst.
I don’t imagine that E. B. White, certainly being aware how
genteel folks of the past used punishing words with such
effect, himself intended to disseminate that sort of an
accusation, for which he needed the perfect word, piffle. I
suspect instead that, due to some annoyance, the word came
to mind, and he wished only to encourage its use that
people once again might know there was a word for it, might
identify stuff and nonsense, pomposity, perhaps, or gossip
and call it by name; that, by knowing the word, people
might use it, and by using it, might effect a shift in our
culture away from tolerance of so much trifling talk or
action.
(Just as it is widely held in some cultures that to know
someone’s name is to have power over him, to know the name
for trifling talk or action, stuff and nonsense is to have
power over it. Who hasn’t had a vague, subconscious sense
about something of which he didn’t become aware and over
which gain control until he could put a word to the
sensation?)
I wish E. B. White were here in order that we might remind
him. I’d be fascinated to know where he intended to go with
it. To his memory as the all-time supreme keeper of words,
I humbly pledge to revive the word, piffle.
2002
©DamnYankee.com
