Defugalty

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi there, this is Jody Harper.

I’m calling from Alabama.

I’m Dothan, Alabama.

Dothan?

That’s right.

Welcome to the program. How can we help?

Well, I have a word that I’ve always wondered about that my grandfather used to use, and it made us laugh hysterically about it when we really thought about it when I was in high school.

Every once in a while, my grandfather would use the word, and he would say, don’t get in a defuglty.

And I never really thought that was a real word.

I thought he was either mispronouncing the word difficulty, or he had merged the word fugue with some other word.

I wasn’t sure what he meant, but it was just one of those funny things where I’d never heard anybody else use the word.

That is great.

Where do you think he picked that up, defuglety?

I don’t know.

He was a sea captain.

He was in the Merchant Marine.

He was an airline navigator.

He had some pretty big adventures in life.

Did he say defugality as kind of a joke or in an ironic way or with a little bit of a laugh?

I don’t know.

He had a really refined sense of humor.

He gave everyone that came into our house some sort of very ironic or sarcastic nickname.

So we had a family friend who would come over, and he didn’t always really work real hard as far as we could tell, but he loved to go to the YMCA and work out.

And he was very physically fit.

And whenever he was coming over, my grandfather would say, oh, here comes medicine ball.

And by the term that was used around me, this man was actually a pretty good beer drinker and had a pretty good beer belly.

I always thought about the medicine ball being under his shirt.

So it sounds to me like your grandfather had a nice sense of humor.

And the reason I asked about that is that this word, difficulty, and it is the regular word difficulty with an intentional mispronunciation.

Has one entry in the Dictionary of American Regional English, and I can find this word with this kind of sound or this kind of spelling as far back as 1931 in a Dashiell Hammett story, The Glass Key.

And so it does exist, and it is usually either, A, a joking way to say the word.

Either you’re kind of making fun of the fact that people pronounce it funny.

They don’t know that they’re saying difficulty, you know.

Right.

Or you’re saying it funny on purpose just to kind of like take a little bit of the sting out of your situation.

Right.

Something bad is happening.

Oh, I’m in a bit of a defuglety here.

Right.

But also you can find it used sometimes to represent the really uncouth or uneducated speech of certain kinds of people.

Like in the Dashiell Hammett story, it’s these like these meathead tough guys who use this word.

And so it’s spelled something like D-E-F-U defuglety or something?

Something like that. Lots of different ways, right?

Yeah, lots of. D-E-F-E-W-G-L-T-Y is one of them, or D-I-F-F-U-C-A-L-T-Y.

So, Grant, it reminds me of that phone call that we had from, was it a bus driver in the Midwest who always used the word skidooly instead of schedule?

Right.

It sounds like an intentional mispronunciation like that.

Yes, it sounds exactly like that, like somebody’s intentionally saying the word incorrectly.

They’re pretending to be ignorant, but they’re actually quite intelligent.

And Jodi, I would tell you that if you want to look online, look for the D-E-F-U-G-A-L-T-Y spelling because there’s a whole discussion on one of the language blogs called Language Hat where there are all these different people talking about how their families used it.

So it wasn’t just your grandpa.

Okay, great.

Well, I could tell you lots of stories.

He did all sorts of things.

Oh, well, you’ll have to call again then.

All right.

Take care of yourself now.

Good talking with you.

Thank you so much.

All right.

Okay, bye-bye.

Best of luck.

Bye-bye.

Okay, bye-bye.

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