Connections count, but word is comfort Trumps the field
Are you comfortable? If you’re reading this on the subway and your nose is closer to someone else’s armpit than your screen or your origami-style handiwork of a folded-up page, then come back to me when you’ve put your slippers on.
Now that we’re relaxed, I want to share you that I walked the streets of Beijing on Friday with reddened cheeks.
My ruddy complexion may have owed much to the first snowfall of the season in the capital and those winds — not the season’s first — but even more so to the rush of blood that followed a check of my email inbox.
The Oxford English Dictionary informed me that its Word of the Day was guanxi. Stay with me: here is the great authority on the English language pronouncing that guanxi is no longer just a Chinese word. Many of you will know this word — redolent with nuance and whispered intrigues — as describing a web of social connections that can be rocket fuel for ladder climbers. The Oxford word nerds don’t have to stray far from home for examples, with the path from the university of that name to 10 Downing Street being especially favored by Conservative Party networkers.
Over the weekend I spent a lot of time in my slippers (those winds again) and, maybe, it was the pot of green tea that was brewed just right. So, as with ideas that are allowed to steep, I made the right neural connections to declare the next star Chinese crossover word. It’s melodious, euphonious, even commodious — it’s shufu. You don’t just say this word; you roll it out, plump it up at the edges and wrap yourself inside it.
Those whose connections in the slippered community run deep may know that this word is all about comfort, feeling ever so just right, and being healthily so. It’s also blessed with a great opening act — an initial consonant digraph (yet more word nerds can take a bow).
The expulsion of air that creates the hearty “sh” sound spills across the low dam wall of the soft middle consonant “f” with a seeming near continuation of that lead-in soothing vowel sound. With all this going for it, I can see the day when mindfulness apps will have people in living rooms around the world affirming: “I am at peace. I am shufu”.
It’s also a far more egalitarian word than some of the other Chinese entries in the Oxford, such as kung fu and cheongsam (the Mandarin form qipao was left in the wardrobe in favor of the Cantonese variant for the slinky dress). No matter how hard I try, I have no more hope of executing a flying drop kick for the former than I do of wriggling into the latter.
The kitchen has cooked up some other Chinese morsels on the Oxford’s plate. But let’s not get comfortable with crumbs if China is to break through as a linguistic power beyond its borders.
Shufu won’t become Word of the Day without some Key Opinion Leaders getting on board. A KOL from the 17th century showed the way here. William Shakespeare is credited with inventing some 1,700 words. Much like what fashionistas have been doing with qipao since the 1920s, he mixed and matched for the occasion with his verbal creations and accessorized like no other KOL in wordsmithery. My ambitions are more modest than the Bard’s; I’m just trying to give a leg-up to one word, albeit as a language hopper.
My hunch is that, just as Shakespeare not only created words but expanded their meanings, shufu may yet add to its dictionary definitions as it grows wings. Indeed, its cross-border prospects may lie with its ability to mesh with modish forms of expression. Older readers keen to inject some Botox into their verbal delivery in the workplace may be drawn to millennial-infused syntax busters such as “I’m way shufu with the action plan”.
Ultimately, shufu’s fortunes on the linguistic campaign trail could hinge on the backing of a name that packs as much KOL gravitas as the Bard’s. Before too long, we may see a future United States president, in response to criticism over the appointment of her father to a senior advisory role, tweet: “I’m really like so way super shufu with that”. Come on, Ivanka. You can do it.