“Scoff your food? Means the same as bolt it down. Or gobble it. Essentially, to eat very fast and greedily.”
As I explained the meaning to my two students—a meaning I hadn’t known but had instantly intuited from the context in the article we were reading and had almost as quickly looked up to confirm—as I explained the word, so similar to scarf, I wondered where it had come from and why. It likely had a different origin than scoff, meaning to mock.
But maybe not. Maybe it had come from a metaphorical use of scoff. Do you mock your food by swallowing it whole, by stuffing your cheeks with it? Is that disrespectful to the food? My students had returned to the exercise they were completing, but I allowed my mind to wander for a moment longer, pursuing these ideas. What pleasures language affords! It is a living thing! Alive and flexible, uncontrollable. A snake, wiggling free through the high grass. If only you could catch it! Make it perform, as a snake charmer might. A thrilling possibility! Such a pleasure of teaching, this glimpse of the snake, one that I would not get if not for my students. A pleasure even if I don’t actually see the slithering snake but only detect its presence in the trail it leaves through the high grass. Yes, even that is a thrill, like what a birdwatcher feels when hearing the song of a rare species and knowing the elusive creature is close at hand. Even if I only imagine it, like that birdwatcher listening with cocked head and then deciding it was only the wind in the trees.
Another pleasure is the polite and almost prim response of these two upper intermediate students, both girls, as I try to impress on them the thrill of following the slithering snake through the high grasses. They are 17 and 18, one just finishing high school, the other with another year. Neither one likes snakes, so I don’t make that comparison, or any, but I tell them that finding the right word is a great satisfaction. For example, I say, swallowing your food doesn’t come close to suggesting scarfing it or scoffing it, bolting it or gobbling it. I wait, half-hopeful, half-deflated. The shy one looks at her book, a smile playing over her lips. The outgoing one maintains eye contact and nods, though she appears slightly dazed.
Later, when I learn about scarf—it is the newer word, a variant of scoff from the 1960s, whereas scoff came into the language in the late 18th century, from old Dutch schoft, meaning a work shift and thus, by extension, a meal—when I learn this, it is too late to tell my students. That’s a good thing because language in general and English in particular is not their joy. I reined in that day and asked what other words they knew for eating. From there we talked about the foods they enjoy and whether one verb or another is better for one food than for another. A lemon tart, I told them, is for me a dessert to really savor. I eat it slowly. Whereas a bowl of lentil soup I relish, without too much fanfare. Fanfare? Pageantry, hype.
All the while, even as I spoke to my students and listened encouragingly to their comments, I was quietly exploring my memory of a David Sedaris essay in which he describes his mother’s response when, as a boy, he stuffed his mouth with a hunk of beef as big as a coin purse. “I hope you choke to death,” she’d hissed at him. He paused in his chewing, wondering if he’d understood correctly. “That’s right, piggy,” she said, “suffocate.” If I appeared to my two students to be distracted, it is because I was.
My students smiled. They exchanged a quick look. They nodded politely. They progressed. When they left the classroom at the end of the hour, they both said goodbye, the shy one with her customary half laugh and quick glance back at her classmate before putting her hand to the doorknob, which often sticks, and the other, with her very erect carriage, closely following but swiveling toward me at my desk to bid me goodbye very formally. “Goodbye,” I answered. And with that, I experienced another pleasure of teaching: being done with a class. Maybe the way Sedaris felt when he was able to swallow the hunk of meat.
