Ingordigiousness
Entry #3 in Dr. Waffle's Lexical Lucubrations
This is the third in a new weekly series of micro-essays using weird, wild, and wonderful words from Dr. Waffle’s venerable list.
ingordigiousness, n.1
Greed, avarice.
No etymology given (!!!)
The Waiter
My family loved going out to eat. I remember when I learned that not all families went to dinner at a proper restaurant at least weekly—the discovery came, as all such discoveries do, when I casually referred to our family practice in front of a school friend. The friend looked at me in confusion (what was I, a Rockefeller?) and I looked at her with pitying horror (was her family in some kind of sect?). (The revelation ranked up there with the times I learned that other families ate orange mac-n-cheese and cut their pizza with scissors.) Because I have such a long history of restaurant-going, I can state definitively that my greatest eating-out neurosis has been with me for many decades: dread of the moment when the waiter comes to clear away the dishes. More often than not, half the food I ordered is still on the plate—not because I didn’t like it, or because I am dieting, or because I have a bizarrely small appetite.2 I have a perfectly normal appetite for a 5-foot-2-inch middle-aged woman with moderate exercise habits, thank you very much. But the world was not made for the likes of me—see kitchen counter heights, car seat adjustment increments, or standard-issue prison uniform sizes. The world was made, apparently, for people who want to (and can!) eat 6 times as much food as I can at a sitting. And therein lies my restaurant anxiety. Approximately halfway through a pleasant meal I will suddenly remember that the waiter is going to come, too soon, to clear away my plate, at which time he will eye the food left upon it and then ask me—gently, sadly, with a faint hint of disappointment in his voice—if everything was okay. “Yes, it was okay!” I want to shout. “There’s just too damn much of it! Stop foisting all this food upon me! It’s too much! The entire world is not made to one pattern of ingordigiousness!” But instead I smile apologetically and promise that it was delicious and that I am so very sorry. It’s all my fault.
We’ve entered new territory (already!) in the Lexical Lucubrations—an officially obsolete word. This week’s entry, in fact, is so comatose that it has only one recorded usage in the Oxford English Dictionary (the official historical glossary of wordniks everywhere), and that was in 1734. But so what? This word is so delicious that it deserves another chance! I may not succeed in single-handedly reviving it, but I can briefly breathe life into its moldering corpse so that it may totter, Frankenstein’s-creature-like, for one more brief promenade upon the earth.
Apparently the thorny problem of people trying to dine out while on Ozempic has reached the Concern Trolling section of The New York Times.