Veggies? No, Thank You.

 I thought about Kitchen & Market briefly as I wondered if a prospective visitor puts milk in his coffee. Suddenly I realized that place is a bougie corner store and then I recoiled. I loathe the word “bougie” as much as I do “veggie,” which is one I’ve never uttered. 

I think it’s the “ie” ending that makes my brain flinch. It makes those words feel like adult baby talk, like cray-cray and jelly. Jelly doesn’t even make sense since it has the same number of syllables as jealous. That has to be a text abbreviation like Imma and gonna. A Hong Kong friend has even shortened don’t to dun.

I can understand the text-spawned words. Phone keyboards are a pain in the neck to use and the fewer characters involved, the better. Blessedly that new language doesn’t seep into spoken words. But veggie has been around for half a century, spoken by people who certainly have the capacity to utter that extra syllable in vegetable. And bougie is just plain idiotic--bring back the old mispronunciation, bushwa, if the original French is too affected to survive in this century. 

Hoi polloi is another annoying term because nobody knows what it means. It’s the rabble, for god’s sake, not the moneyed class. Namesake annoys me too, since it originally referred to a person named after another, not a person whose name was given to someone younger.

We live in the era of Humpty Dumpty. “When I use a word it means what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.” Slang used to revitalize the language, not infantilize it. 

Dr. Oz was pilloried for referring to a selection of raw, bite-sized vegetables as crudités, instead of a veggie plate. It may be the only thing about that fraud that I can understand--if I had to choose between the two names, I’d call it crudités too. But I wouldn’t choose. I’d learned to call it vegetables many years ago.

The one time I ordered crudités from a menu, it was in Fairbanks,Alaska,  back in the day when quiche hadn’t yet become a cliché. The waitress, a sweet woman from the Kenai Peninsula, repeated my order as crudite with a long i in its last syllable. After that I just ordered a plate of raw vegetables and we remained friends. But there was no way in hell that I’d order veggies. I’d rather have crudite, even though the mispronunciation makes it sound like something that could kill Superman.

What all this means is I’m growing old. Nobody says “it used to be” or “back in the day” unless they’re doddering. No matter that I hated “veggie” when I was a mere slip of a girl at thirty. Some people are born old while others are Noam Chomsky. Prescriptive? Descriptive? I’ll take a helping of both, but for god’s sake, don’t offer me baby talk.