Writing Life

On January 20 I wrote about a handwritten travel journal I had purchased a few days earlier at an antiques faire. The journal was kept by an American woman as she traveled from her home in Honolulu to various ports in Japan, China, and the Philippines. The woman doesn’t reveal her own name in the journal, but for the sake of convenience I dubbed her “Hattie.” The journal begins on June 26, 1922, as Hattie departs Honolulu aboard a Japanese ship called the Korea Maru. It concludes on September 3, as she is steaming homeward aboard the Shinyo Maru.

On July 27, 1922, Hattie boarded a luxury liner called the Empress of Canada. She described it as, “a floating palace, the most beautiful boat I ever expect to see. It is a British boat and said to be the largest on the Pacific.” She boarded the boat at Macao. It took her to various ports in both China and Japan. At about the time she boarded the boat, a new word began appearing in her journal. Hattie’s handwriting is somewhat sloppy, so I had difficulty deciphering the exact spelling of this new word. Most times it looked like “liffeu.” But at various times I thought it might be “liffen,” “liffeen,” “tiffeu,” “tiffen,” or even “tiffiu.” Although the spelling of the word wasn’t clear, the definition seemed fairly obvious given the context in which she used it. The word first appears in the entry for July 26: “Took a steamer at 8 a.m. Arrived there [Macao] at 12 O.K. [her abbreviation for “o’clock]. Had liffeu at 11 O.K.” Hattie appears to be a bit absentminded in this entry. The time of her arrival and the time of her “liffeu” appear to have been reversed. That first mention of liffeu left me scratching my head. But later references [despite apparent variations in spelling] cleared the matter up a bit:

July 27: “Left the Carlton House after ‘liffeu’ in a pouring rain. Got in a launch for the steamer Empress of Canada…”

July 28: “After liffen the crew rushed to close all portholes and hatches. Soon a driving rain came down in sheets.

August 2: “Mr. Kreider ordered a Chinese dinner without consulting any of us. Three of us could not eat! We had a good liffeu at 2:30, so I survived.”

August 3: “Had an early liffeu.”

August 5: “This is a very nice boat and a nice roomy stateroom. Had p.m. tea. Had breakfast on boat. And liffiu. Did not enjoy either as the coffee was rotten.”

August 9: “We were met at the train by the Central House bus. A very good place to stay, and the cheapest we have struck. After getting our bearings and unpacking had liffin.”

August 10: “Went to the Hotel Peking where we found Cooks [Thomas Cook Travel Company, an early issuer of travelers checks]. Got some money. Hurried back for some liffen.”

August 15: “I passed a fairly good night. Had trouble with stomachache. Ate some breakfast and am alright. Will not eat liffeen.”

August 16: “Had breakfast. It was a cool night [in the Japanese town of Miyajima]. The hotel is up high, facing the lake. Took a walk. Went to the shrine. Saw the service. Had liffeu there.”

From those entries, it seems clear that liffeu (regardless of how it is spelled) is a meal, most likely lunch. After reading the journal, I tried to research the word liffeu on the internet. Because Hattie is from Hawaii and uses the Hawaiian term “haole” for “white people,” I mistakenly assumed that liffeu might also be a Hawaiian term. Thus, when I searched liffeu and its variants on the internet I often paired it with “Hawaii” or “Hawaiian.” For that reason, apparently, I was unable to find any reference to it. Eventually I conceded defeat and gave up looking, but the term continued to gnaw at the back of my mind. Today, roughly a month since I first encountered liffeu, I decided to resume my search for its true spelling, definition, and origin. And after entering a variety of different spellings into a search engine, I finally found one that worked: “tiffin.” According to various internet sites, “tiffin” is a British term for “lunch.” To confirm this I took out my American Heritage Dictionary (4th Edition) and, voila, there I found: “tiffin: n. Chiefly British A meal at midday. A luncheon. [Short for tiffing, gerund of tiff, to sip.]”

I don’t think it is any coincidence that Hattie began using “tiffin” instead of “lunch” right around the time she boarded the RMS Empress of Canada. Although the ship was owned by a company called Canadian Pacific Steamships, it was a royal mail carrier and may well have been staffed by many Britons (then, as now, Canada was a constitutional monarchy over which the King or Queen of England reigned as head of state). In any case, British customs and British English probably prevailed aboard the ship. And that appears to be the reason why, in the middle of her Oriental tour, Hattie switched from “lunch” to “tiffin.”

Curiously, though it is a British word, tiffin actually has an Eastern origin. Michael Quinion, a Cambridge University-educated expert on the English language, maintains a website called World Wide Words that explores the origins and meanings of odd and obscure English words. Here is what Quinion’s website reports on the origins of tiffin:

More than any other word, tiffin evokes British India.
It entered the language at the very beginning of the nineteenth century, perhaps because the English fashion for eating dinner mid-afternoon was giving way under the influence of the Indian climate to a main meal taken later in the day, requiring a lighter midday meal and a name for it. Why the much older luncheon wasn’t used isn’t clear. Instead, the English in India borrowed tiffing, an old English dialect or slang word for taking a little drink or sip. (I forbear from suggesting that the habit among some sahibs of drinking their lunch had something to do with the popularity of the term.) The word is still widely used in India for any hot light meal or snack taken at any time during the day.
In Mumbai (formerly Bombay), the term tiffin-wallah is sometimes heard, though the more common term is dabbawallah. Lunches are cooked at home by workers’ wives and then transported, often by train, perhaps 20 or 30 miles to their husbands’ workplaces, each three-tiered tiffin-carrier or dabba probably passing through several hands in a sophisticated and efficient cooperative process. Those who deliver the meals by bicycle on the final stage of their journeys are the tiffin-wallahs or dabbawallahs.

An early example of tiffin is from a guide book, Cordiner’s Ceylon, of 1808: “Many persons are in the habit of sitting down to a repast at one o’clock, which is called tiffen, and is in fact an early dinner.”

How interesting it is that Hattie, a twentieth century Honolulu resident, traveled to Macao, a region of China that was once a Portuguese colony, and there, aboard a Canadian ship, picked up a curious nineteenth century English word that was first coined by British people living in India. If that isn’t an example of the ability of language to transcend time and place, I don’t know what is.

Sayonara…Aloha…Good Bye…