Spleeny

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello.

Hi, who is this?

My name is Jean, and I’m from northern Michigan.

Hi, Jean. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Jean.

Hi.

What’s going on?

Well, there’s a word that I used as a child growing up in the state of Maine, and it was the word spleeny. And my question is, is it still in use? And I will tell you the context in which it was used when I was a child. And it would be when, like, my mother was taking a splinter out of my finger, and I would be cringing and pulling away, and she would say to me, don’t be so spliny, meaning that I was overly sensitive to the action to my body, evidently. And I just thought that this, you know, this was what everyone used.

Well, as a young married lady, I moved to Michigan. And I remember getting a shot from the doctor, and I looked at him and said, I’m going to have to turn away because I’m a bit spleeny. And he looked at me as if I were speaking a foreign language. And it was at that point I realized that not everyone used this word. And also, is it ever used since then? I don’t know. I’ve not heard it.

You’re worried that you’re the last remaining spleeny speaker.

You know, I think I am.

Well, this is fantastic, Jean, because your story fits exactly with the research that we have.

Oh, nice.

Yeah, it shows that the term spliny in the United States is chiefly heard in New England, and it has to do with being overly sensitive to feelings of fear or pain or distaste or even hypochondriacal. But spleeny has been around for centuries, just referring to…

200 years plus, right?

Yeah, yeah.

In England, referring to somebody who’s sort of ill-humored. And it goes back to the idea of the spleen affecting your mood. So we used to ascribe some emotions to sourcing from the spleen, right? The same way we still describe certain things as coming from the heart.

Yes, yes. The spleen was thought to produce the bile that produced melancholy back in the day.

Yeah, but spleen, he doesn’t seem to have migrated south or east.

No, and it’s still not that common, right?

Yeah.

It’s kind of a showy word that fiction writers will use, and you, Jean.

Yeah, I was going to say, it didn’t migrate east, but it migrated west.

No, I think I was cured that day.

Not cured out of the word fence.

Yeah. But your description dovetails perfectly with what we know about it. It was in New England, and you took it west.

Okay. Well, that’s very interesting, and it’s interesting to see how it evolved from melancholy to hypochondria, really.

Yeah, a little squeamish. That’s really interesting.

Nice.

I’ve never heard it used that way.

Okay.

Thank you so much, Jean.

Okay. I appreciate you taking my call.

All right. Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

I have an entry for the least useful definition of all time, by the way.

Oh, great.

Let’s hear it.

So if you go to the Oxford English Dictionary, admittedly some of their entries have not been updated since the 1880s, right?

Okay.

And you look up splenie, it defines it as splenetic or spleenful.

Not helpful, OED.

Not helpful.

OED fail.

Again, I don’t think it’s been updated in a long time, but still.

You’re being a little splenie, Grant.

A pitch.

A pitch.

A bit.

A dite.

That’s what they say in Maine.

A dite, a little bit.

A dite-spleening, yes.

Yeah, a dite-spleening.

Well, we’d love to hear your questions. You said something, people didn’t understand it, and now you want justice. This is the place to go. 877-929-9673 or email words@waywordradio.org.