Mother Tongue
My mother used a word I’ve never heard anyone else use.
It described the state of a room after many people have been in it and left: not dirty or empty, just a room altered substantially by the absence of people who were there just a minute ago.
She used this word throughout my childhood. I started using it without thinking. I used it with my husband, who understood it from context and began using it himself.
Last year I used it in a work meeting and no one knew what that word meant. After that I tried to find it in a dictionary, but it’s not there. I looked for it in lists of regional and dialectal English. It’s not there either.
I asked my sister, who said, “I know that word.” She couldn’t say where she had heard it. I asked my aunt. She knew it immediately. She said, “Yes, that’s the word for that.”
None of us can account for it. My mother, who would know, cannot be asked.
The word exists in the vocabularies of at least four people and nowhere else on record. It applies to a specific condition that apparently required naming badly enough that someone—my mother, presumably—decided to name it.
I’ve been thinking about what she felt when she first needed the word. She must have looked for it, as I looked, and found nothing. She must have decided at some point to supply it herself.
The word sounds old. It has the quality of having been used for centuries.
That quality doesn’t belong to words you normally invent for fun when you’re little; invented words have a freshness to them, the mark of recent coinage. This one has no freshness. This is a serious piece of work. It fits what it names exactly, as if the thing and the word arrived in the language together.
My husband used it last week. He was talking about a hotel room. He said it correctly, without thinking, without looking at me. He didn’t know he had done anything of note.
I wrote it down.
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