Kefuffle.
This locutionary delight came to me from one of my Canadian friends.
Kefuffle means exactly what it sounds like.
A kefuffle is what happens when, for example, you juggle schedules to arrange for the
new couch to be delivered in the afternoon after your old couch has been removed by the
Salvation Army in the morning (Plan A).
But the Salvation Army truck driver has truck problems and he can't come until next
week, so you call the furniture store to delay delivery of your new sofa, but their truck
is already headed your way, so you quickly devise Plan B, in which you cajole a friend to
help you get the old couch into the garage, but Plan C is needed to get the tractor mower
out from behind the bicycles to park it in the yard but the mower has been sitting behind
the bikes all winter and won't start.
The old couch is propped precariously against the laundry room wall, its feet are
making little round dents in the paint and you are desperately trying to think up Plan D
while supporting the couch with your back and it's slipping, making scrapes in the wall,
and suddenly Plan A becomes Plan E because the furniture delivery truck arrives with the
wrong couch.
In other words, a kefuffle is a real mess. Just like it sounds.
Sometimes new words don't give a clue to their meanings. Like
"farhvergnugen." Thanks to the world of advertising, most people older than 20
know which car manufacturer has brought us this word, and it's a fun word to speak, but
what does it translate to?
I remember when "smog" was a new word. The whole world of brown air breathers
knew its meaning immediately.
These days we have an entirely new language mingling with English. My husband tells me
it is English. Sure, it sounds like English, but when he comes home from work mumbling
about odd harmonic filters, I have no idea what he's talking about. That's Computerese.
In my opinion, odd harmonic filters are strange-sounding phrases that should be
filtered out of our vocabulary.
Sometimes I wonder if we've created a 20th century Tower of Babble. Even the ordinary,
old words often become nothing more than meaningless mumbo-jumbled-up silence-fillers. We
talk much without saying much. Or we say much that others cannot comprehend. Many of our
words hurt.
I suspect most of our sins start in the mouth. A wise old saying puts it this way:
Listen twice as often as you speak, because the Lord gave us two ears and only one mouth.
And two feet to put in the mouth.
God knew our words would create quite a few kefuffles.
