Languages in the Big Apple

So I’m currently in the middle of a slightly unhealthy obsession with Evelyn Waugh. I’ve devoured seven of his fourteen novels and most recently, Fathers and Sons, the epic saga of the famous literary family written by his grandson, Alexander Waugh.

I won’t go into why Evelyn’s the greatest novelist who ever lived, nor will I bore you salivating over his dialogue sequences (so good).

No, what I really want to talk about is the colloquialisms of Waugh’s upper-crust subjects, particularly their penchant for inventing fancy versions of adjectives by adding “-making” as a suffix.

It works wonders. Check it out:

If something is embarrassing, it’s “simply too shy-making.”
Whatever makes you feel nauseous is “ill-making.”
Whatever you take to feel better is “better-making.”

You get the idea.

When and why did this linguistic construct disappear? It’s so practical! So perfectly concise! So user-friendly! Put away your thesaurus; just say how you feel and add “-making” at the end.

You’d think the simplicity of the construct alone would have kept it around to this day. Maybe it still exists in the U.K., but I’ve certainly never heard anyone use it in New York.

Wait. That’s a lie. One of my professors from college said “shy-making” once. But she was a writing teacher, and a Catholic, so there’s no doubt in my mind that she was just giving a shout-out to old Evy-poo.

I googled “shy-making” to see what I could dig up. A bunch of British blogs had links to something called the Splendidizer, a language-beautification operation on the now-defunct website for Bright Young Things, the movie inspired by Waugh’s Vile Bodies. The Splendidizer could supposedly turn any boring paragraph into prose that Lady Agatha Runcible herself would find laugh-making.

The Splendidizer may be gone, but it’s time to bring this ingenious idiom back to life on our own. To let it die out completely would be too sad-making. New York, consider this a call to action.